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REALITIES AND IDEALS 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd, 

TORONTO 



REALITIES AND 
IDEALS 



SOCIAL, POLITICAL, LITERARY 
AND ARTISTIC 



BY 

FREDERIC HARRISON 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1908 

jiU rights reserved 






U8RARYofO«N6nE6S 

IwoCoDles AecwrM! 

SEP 14 )i^08 

g-m Cattif r till ciiiry 

cuifca (JL fAc Naii^ 



Copyright, 1908, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1908. 



NorSjjonU ^ttm 

J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 






^ 



TO 

E. B. H. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Preface xi 



PART I 
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL 

ESSAY 

I. England and France . . . . . , . i 

II. The Future of Woman , 63 

III. The Realm of Woman 82 

IV. The Work of Women 102 

V. Votes for Women 123 

VI. Civil Marriage 138 

VII. Religious Marriage 146 

VIII. Marriage Law Conflicts 151 

IX. Funeral Rites 156 

X. Cremation 161 

XI. Centenaries 167 

XII. Modern Pilgrimages 175 

Xni. The Use of Sunday . . . . . . . 180 

XIV. The Veto on Drink 187 

vii 



VIU REALITIES AND IDEALS 

ESSAY PAGE 

XV. Church Disestablishment 193 

XVI. The Recognition of Anglican Orders . . . 199 

XVII. The Crisis in the Church 206 

XVIII. Primary Education . . . ... . 214 

XIX. Metropolitan School Board 221 

. XX. Parliamentary Candidature 224 

XXI. Reform of the Lords . . . . . . 227 

XXII. A True Senate ........ 232 

XXIII. The Lords Once More 237 

XXIV. Parliamentary Procedure . . . . . 242 



PART II 

LITERATURE AND ART 

I. The Uses of Rich Men . 

II. The Revival of the Drama 

III. Decadence in Modern Art 

IV. Art and Shoddy 
V. Thoughts about Education 

VI. Education versus Examination 

VII. Literature To-day . 

VIII. "FoRS Clavigera" . 

IX. The Century Club . 

X. Sir Leslie Stephen . 

XI. Francis W. Newman 



263 

278 
293 
307 
320 

331 

344 
348 
352 
360 

371 



CONTENTS 



IX 



ESSAY 

XII. Canon Liddon . 

XIII. Sir Charles Cookson 

XIV. Sir James Knowles . 
XV. Herbert Spencer 

XVI. Herbert Spencer's " Life " 

XVII. Municipal Museums of Paris 

XVIII. Paris in 1851 and in 1907 

XIX. The Elgin Marbles 

XX. A Pompeii for the Thirtieth Century 



378 
383 
386 

390 
393 
399 

414 

432 
446 



PREFACE 

This volume is the fourth of a series of Essays pubHshed 
in the present and the preceding year : — 

The Creed of a Layman, K^OJ, 
The Philosophy of Common Sense, 1907, 
National and Social Problems, 1908, 
Realities and Ideals, 1908. 

The collected series treats of Religion, Philosophy, 
Politics, Economics, Literature, and Art. Diverse as 
are the subjects, and varied as is the form, of these studies, 
they are all based on one coherent scheme of thought — 
the Positivist Synthesis — a reorganisation of life, at once 
intellectual, moral, and social, by faith in our common 
Humanity. 

The forty-four Essays have been composed at various 
times over more than forty years ; yet, I trust, they will be 
found to be not only consistent but mutually to explain 
and complete each other. Some appeared in early num- 
bers of English or American Reviews : some were written 
in the present year : a few were printed privately or were 
known only to colleagues and friends. The whole are 
more or less biographic, and are personal reminiscences 
of men whom I have known, of movements in which I have 
had a share, or of events which I have witnessed. 



xil REALITIES AND IDEALS 

The first and principal Essay on "England and France " 
is an extract from a joint volume on International Policy, 
first published in 1866 and since reissued. It embodies 
the writer's mature belief in a systematic co-operation be- 
tween our two nations as the key of peace and progress in 
Europe. That which half a century ago was but a distant 
Ideal to me and to my friends, I have lived to see as a 
Reality — accepted, effective, and permanent. 

Three Essays on the burning questions of the Rights, 
Duties, and Claims of Women have not previously ap- 
peared in print. The fifth Essay, on " Votes for Women," 
has been written in view of the present agitation, which I 
regard as charged with tremendous consequences, political, 
social, and moral. 

Twenty of these papers were published in the small 
Positivist Review (Watts & Co., 3^.), in which I have con- 
tinued to write, almost month by month, since its founda- 
tion in January 1893. These Essays deal with current 
topics, political, social, and literary ; the subjects are of 
perennial interest, and time has by no means led me to 
modify the principles on which they were based. 

A few papers appeared in the Press or were addressed 
to public associations. 

I have to thank The Fortnightly Review, The Nineteenth 
Century, The Cornhill Magazine, and The Forum of New 
York for courteous permission to include in this volume 
articles contributed on various occasions within the last 
twenty years. 

The twenty papers in Part II. on Literature, Art, Drama, 
and Education arose out of various incidents or discussions 
of the day ; and I trust that no too punctilious reader will 



PREFACE Xlll 

pronounce them to be beneath the attention of a serious 

moralist : — 

ridentem dicere verum 
quid vetat ? 

The general theory of life on which all that I have ever 
written is grounded, assumes that every form of culture 
and everything that tends to brighten our existence should 
contribute in its place to the sum of human happiness : — 

humani nihil a me alienum. 
Hawkhurst, August 1908. 



PART I 

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL 



I 

ENGLAND AND FRANCE 

{From International Policy, 1866) 

I 

Since the close of the Revolutionary war, the pivot upon 
which the politics of Europe have hinged will be found in 
the relations of England with France. For fifty years this 
fact has been gaining in importance and distinctness. It 
has now, both here and abroad, modified the thoughts of 
writers, politicians, and the public. The events of each suc- 
ceeding decade show with new force, that in union between 
the two great heads of the West lies the true protection to 
Europe against attack from without, against war from 
within ; its best guarantee for freedom, peace, and progress. 
Notorious disunion between the two Powers has uniformly 
been the signal to Europe for intrigue, oppression, embroil- 
ment, and war. Order and progress generally have gained 
or lost just as this union has been intimate or weak. It 
may be said that, if this last half-century has been to Europe 
a period of almost unexampled prosperity and repose, it 
is because the first condition of both — union between 
the heads of Western civilisation — has never been so 
nearly realised before. 

This union, however, has been at best but imperfect 
and precarious. It has not rested on political doctrine or 
general conviction. Yet, rudely shaken as it has been, it 
has sufficed to protect us from actual war, and, indeed, from 



2 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

any serious or protracted rupture. We may trust that each 
year of well-used peace makes war between England and 
France more and more improbable. It is yet, however, 
far from impossible (written in 1864). That it should be 
so, much remains to be accomplished in both countries. 
In both there must arise very different conceptions of the 
duties, the rights, and the true interests of nations; a new 
sense of responsibility in public men and teachers; a con- 
viction here and in Europe that such a war would be the 
greatest of all European calamities; a belief that it would 
retard our progress for the life, at least, of a generation. 

A feeling between the two great neighbours, sufhciently 
friendly to preserve them from collision, has thus gradually 
grown stronger. It has not yet become strong enough to re- 
move the constant recurrence of quarrels, fanned from time 
to time by the craft or the folly of politicians and journal- 
ists in both countries. Nor has this feeling succeeded in 
staying that ceaseless undercurrent of jealousy, misunder- 
standing, and antagonism that crosses the main tide of 
goodwill which sets from shore to shore. Indefinite, un- 
stable, and without root, the harmony between England and 
France has been an instinct, and not a principle. If it has 
preserved us from great evils, it has not been able to achieve 
any grand success. It has sufficed for the calm ; it will not 
bear the trial of the storm (1864). 

It is the purpose of this Essay to inquire into the mode by 
which this union might be grounded on a permanent and 
solid base ; to ask what must be the conditions, what would 
be the results, of a standing and definite alliance. The 
great European importance of any such union of England 
and France is this, that in an especial manner these two 
Powers represent, if they do not guide, the grand movements 
of our actual state system. Whatever the intellectual and 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 3 

moral gifts of other races in Europe, for the time these two 
nations are the great political forces of the West. They are 
essentially co-ordinate, though not antagonistic. England 
represents tradition, stability, personal liberty, law, indus- 
trialism, and national independence. France represents 
the Revolution and its principles; the amalgamation of 
classes; the reorganisation of the social and the political 
system; the resettlement of the general state system; the 
rights of nationalities; government at once popular in its 
origin and in its aims ; rule in the interests of the many and 
not of the few. Each Power singly is constantly tempted 
to force its phase of progress extravagantly and exclusively — 
the influence of England from time to time being degraded 
to the level of commercial rapacity, industrial greed, and 
stolid conservatism; the influence of France to that of 
military ambition, revolutionary disorder, or tyranny veiled 
under the name of public welfare. 

Now these two Powers, the natural complement of each 
other, can never combine their influence in any lasting or 
grand object, except for the general advantage of Europe.^ 
Combined, they strengthen the good tendencies of each other, 
and equally neutralise the evil. Opposed, they neutralise 
the good and exaggerate the evil. The jealousies which 
each arouses, when acting with vigour by itself, are calmed 
when that action is jointly pursued by both. The policy 
of France, when heartily in unison with England, can awaken 
no reasonable terrors amongst her neighbours. Backed by 
the champion in Europe of peace, order, personal and national 
liberty, France can promote her principles without her 
designs seeming charged with disorder and ambition. Ac- 
tively supported by France, England appeals to the nations 

^ This must be understood of the action of these Powers in Europe 
alone. Beyond its limits, and free from the restraints of their position 
towards our Continent, they occasionally combine in a joint oppression. 



4 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

of Europe with a moral force which has no modern equiva- 
lent. With her Catholic democratic and military neighbour 
at her right hand, she stands up amongst the nations as the 
symbol of something more than selfish conservatism; she 
shakes off that dull dogmatism which has so often nullified 
her action and swung her round against her will to the party 
of blind resistance. England and France — the Teutonic 
Protestant parliamentary and industrial power side by 
side with the Latin Catholic revolutionary and dictatorial 
power — represent together principles so various, and 
comprise the dominant forces so nearly, that in any policy 
in which they cordially agree no element of life is likely to 
be sacrificed, whilst all are certain to be harmonised. 

No sooner, however, are the two representative Powers 
estranged, than the principles which they embody fall back, 
not so much into independent action, as into inevitable 
collision. In the former case they were kept in something 
like joint action, however imperfectly consolidated; in the 
latter they neutralise each other without any useful result. 
Divided, each seeks to maintain or promote its special lines 
of influence. Each, in the diplomatic language of the day, 
seeks for new allies, and forms alliances which of necessity 
are at once precarious and unnatural. Neither England nor 
France can find in Europe any equal and natural alliance 
except with each other. This broken, any other alliance is 
a fresh source of insecurity both to them and to Europe. 

As the separation of the two natural allies grows plainer, 
each more obstinately pursues its special tendencies and its 
national ambitions in schemes which forebode danger to 
Europe, and infallibly arouse the suspicions of the other. 
France agitates her neighbours with crude visions of a re- 
settlement of the state system, partly revolutionary, partly 
autocratic; now she parades her Catholicism, now her 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 5 

military prestige, now her democratic zeal; now she is the 
chief of the Latin race, now the military arbiter of the West, 
now the apostle of the Revolution. England on her side at 
these moments assumes a part even more odious and hardly 
less pernicious. She prides herself on reducing everything 
to dead-lock; she professes a policy of inaction, negative, 
repressive, and critical; she constitutes herself the grand 
obstructive; her diplomacy is one long non possumus; she 
insists on every claim of mere legality, and suppresses every 
claim of moral right ; she bolsters up every abuse and every 
retrograde and rotten system ; she sinks into the blindest and 
most dogged conservatism, and withdraws in a sort of sulky 
despair from the councils of Europe, to fling herself into the 
task of founding new empires in distant oceans, and plunder- 
ing and trampling on races of a darker skin. Other interests 
in Europe she is content to abandon, satisfying herself with 
barren protests, with checkmating every movement for good 
or for bad, with forming cabals against France to prevent her 
from abusing the season of confusion and dead-lock which 
the indifference of England herself has produced (1866). 

These are the seasons which the elements of reaction 
in Europe welcome as their special time of harvest. Under 
the shelter which England then affords to pure conservatism, 
the princes and the princelets of Germany grow bolder in 
their career of absolutism. Under the shelter of the Catholic- 
ity which France at such moments finds it convenient to 
parade, the Pope consolidates his feeble tyranny. Russia, 
whose place is beyond the pale of European politics proper, 
forms monstrous bonds of alliance, first with one, then with 
another. Power; and safe behind the mask of an external 
civilisation, she steals another footstep nearer to the Danube 
or the Dardanelles. The same is true wherever a weaker 
oppressor is watching for his time of spoliation. Never 



6 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

does he strike the blow until assured that England and France 
are on too bad terms to repress him. Nor is such a season 
less favourable to intrigue than it is to violence. It is the 
signal for a grand campaign of continental cabals. 

In the recent history of Europe nearly every disaster 
which the cause of freedom and progress has suffered has 
been caused during a season of estrangement, and largely 
by reason of estrangement, between the two great Powers. 
Attacks upon Turkey by Russia demanded as their first 
condition that England and France should be supposed 
unable to combine. The Crimean war would not have been 
commenced unless Nicholas, in his shortsighted disdain for 
Napoleon, had thought it impossible for English statesmen 
to ally themselves with him. The successive partitions of 
Poland have been effected only under a similar conviction. 
The petty spoliation of Denmark was effected only when 
Napoleon had been ostentatiously rebuffed in his overtures 
towards a Polish intervention. Austria triumphed over 
Hungary and Italy in 1848 in great measure because she 
knew that the English and the French Governments were 
quite incapable of co-operation. Had England, even by 
her moral weight, accepted the demands of France to aid in 
freeing Italy from Austria, she might with some effect have 
prevented the tyrannical restoration of the Pope by French 
bayonets. Nor would Austria have ventured to cross the 
Ticino in 1859 if the close alliance of the Crimean war had 
continued between the heads of the West. The diplomatic 
history of nearly every one of the catastrophes of freedom in 
recent times is a story of persistent and wily efforts of the 
oppressor to divide the policy of two great Powers, or to 
profit by their divisions ; and of efforts no less persistent by 
the oppressed to bring these Powers into concert, or at least 
into the semblance of outward agreement. 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 7 

By arguments negative and positive, by analogy as well 
as by example, it can be shown that harmony between the 
two great Powers is essential to the well-being of Europe. 
But has this harmony as yet any permanent basis? Have 
the various causes which have contributed to a long peace 
such solid foundation in principle as to render peace a 
certainty ? Has not mutual respect and a general conviction 
of joint interest been at the highest the sole ground of union ? 
Has anything like active co-operation been secured excepting 
from causes at once superficial and shifting? 

The cordiality between the two Governments, which from 
time to time the journals of both countries announce with 
fulsome protestations, is generally the result of little more 
than a party manoeuvre, the commonplace of a feeble minis- 
try, or the device of an intriguing politician. How often 
within thirty years has the clique which is called the Whig 
party blustered and fawned before the Government of 
France! How often has the ministry of England found it 
useful to flatter or to affront the Emperor Napoleon ! How 
often has an entente cordiale, heralded by so much cheap 
eloquence, been broken in the very year which saw its rise — 
to be revived next year to serve a parliamentary division ! 
Cabinet intrigues, demonstrations from the press, compli- 
ments and feasts in palaces, exert no useful influence on the 
politics of two great races, and do nothing to cement a union 
between them. A true union must be made by the nations, 
not by ministries; it must be based on principles, not pro- 
testations; it must start from a common programme of 
action, in which the entire nation can feel pride, and which 
the entire nation in both countries understands. 

Sometimes, instead of being the device of a politician, 
a temporary alliance between the two countries has arisen 
from express or tacit agreement to permit to each some 



8 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

cherished object of ambition. Such occasions must always 
be of small importance, and are hardly possible at all in 
Europe. But in any case such a union is necessarily pre- 
carious. Real union implies, not a compromise on special 
matters, but a thorough understanding on the general 
course of European politics. If any of the greater questions 
are left out, they will constantly recur to trouble the superficial 
agreement. But a real unity of purpose on all the questions 
at issue will be a union too comprehensive to be affected by 
personal intrigues, too moderate and mature to give anything 
but confidence to their neighbours. 

If it is prudent to inquire on what grounds the harmony 
of England with France is ordinarily placed, it is dishearten- 
ing to learn how slight in reality these are. Commercial 
interest is usually the sole, and certainly is the main, bond 
of union to which statesmen and writers commonly appeal. 
Seldom do we hear from one school or the other any principle 
of policy which rises above the sensible but obvious advice 
that two neighbouring nations, each with so large a trade, 
will probably increase it by remaining on good terms. Noth- 
ing more is required, we are assured, for harmony and 
prosperity in nations whom nature has designed for mutual 
customers but unlimited free trade and general extension of 
their markets. Vaguely and mechanically from the lips of 
aristocratic statesmen, dogmatically and passionately from 
those of the popular school, this is proclaimed as the sum and 
substance of European politics. There can be no clearer 
proof of the feebleness of the current political doctrines. 
Commonplaces of this kind can stand no serious test, 
much less can they produce any solid progress in opinion. 
Thus to exaggerate the importance of their commercial 
interests and duties is to do dishonour to both countries 
at once. It would not have been heard of except at a 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 9 

time when economic ideas have supplanted true political 
principles. 

Nor is this teaching less futile than immoral. France 
in particular, for reasons — some honourable, some dis- 
honourable, to her national character — can act, and fre- 
quently does act, in open disregard to her material interests. 
Both England and France are continually moved by currents 
of feeling, in which all thoughts of the market are swept 
away like straws. In both countries civilisation has a far 
wider significance than this ; and the policy of neither country 
is invariably in the hands of the shopkeepers. Each nation 
is ready to make efforts and sacrifices for very different 
ends. Hence Cobden's Commercial Treaty has been, in a 
moral and national sense, ridiculously overvalued. It is a 
useful measure, and in spite of the free-trade purists, a 
sensible measure, which does honour to the conscientious 
economist who achieved it and the adroit financier who made 
it popular. On both sides of the Channel, besides making 
several towns or classes richer (which is its principal result), 
it has done something towards promoting more friendly 
language, and perhaps more sincere goodwill. But since the 
policy both of England and France is ultimately directed 
by the nation, and not by the class which principally benefits 
by an improvement in trade, an alliance which is based on 
commercial interest may at any moment be shattered by 
those deeper currents which fill the nation with a strong 
purpose; in fact, an alliance between two great nations so 
situated, which was based entirely on trade, would scarcely 
last many months. Assuredly it would not enable the two 
Powers to do much for the peace and prosperity of Europe. 

Such are the grounds on which union with France is 
usually based. It is obvious that none of these can render 
it lasting. That which has now for so many years, and 



10 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

through trials so severe, really maintained the good harmony 
between them has been the conviction, common to all but 
a few in both countries, that the great ends necessary for the 
welfare of France are, in the main, those necessary for the 
welfare of England. Here the dregs of the old aristocratic, 
there of the old military, fanatics nurse the malignant hatred 
of the great war; but in this generation, for responsible 
beings in both countries, the old religious duty of rivalry 
and antipathy is as completely extinct as the morbid passion 
of national hate which dishonoured the fine nature even of 
Nelson. Frenchmen are not reared, like boy Hannibals, 
to dream of a tremendous vengeance; and patrician bigots 
no longer clamour in our senate for the extinction of a rival 
Carthage. But it is obvious that, as a fixed ground of 
national policy, the vague sense of common interests between 
the two countries needs to be placed on a basis far more 
systematic and definite. The policy of two nations such as 
England and France, acknowledged as the heads of civilisa- 
tion in Europe, must of necessity embrace great European 
objects, must take some attitude towards the principal move- 
ments of the Continent, and satisfy the conscience and the 
honour of two generous races. 

Ends such as these can hardly be effected by commercial 
treaties, by free trade, or by large increases in consumption. 
The most confirmed intention of buying only in the cheapest 
and selling only in the dearest market is liable to be deranged 
by very singular perturbations. Nothing, in fact, can rise 
to the dignity of a national policy but a broad, wise, and 
comprehensive estimate of the true situation of modern 
Europe. Neither country would be assuming its natural 
position unless it is prepared to face resolutely the conditions 
in which it stands, and to assume responsibilities called forth 
by each occasion. Nor will such a policy be of any perma- 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE II 

nent use, unless it is thoroughly in harmony with the history 
and traditions of both people ; unless it is felt to be the true 
destiny pointed out by centuries of national life; unless it 
can take hold at once of the higher minds of the nation and 
the instincts and sympathies of the mass of the people. 

Any harmony between England and France that professes 
to be based on anything short of a principle such as this 
can be nothing but a mockery or a phrase. Each nation 
must have, and will have, its national policy more or less 
systematic, more or less comprehensive. And it follows 
with complete certainty that, unless the policy of each tends 
in the main towards the same end, they will sooner or later 
result in a conflict. It is the tendency of such a conflict, 
even where it stops short of overt hostility, to produce a 
minimum of good and a maximum of evil in the influence of 
each. Not vague protestations of friendship, not common 
interests in trade, commercial treaties, or industrial partner- 
ship, can secure us from the constant risk of rupture. If 
harmony between England and France is good at all for the 
countries themselves and for their neighbours, the conditions 
of that harmony are not to be mistaken. Each country 
must have a settled and deliberate scheme of policy; the 
policy of both, in the main, must coincide. It must be worked 
up into systematic concert with good faith, forbearance, and 
patience; and it must tend not towards the individual 
interests of either so much as the permanent welfare of the 
great state system which they control. 

The task is to learn whether and in what way such a 
union of policy is practically possible. Can any joint action 
of the two Powers be shown to accord with the history and 
traditions, with the actual position and necessities, of each ? 
For this view it will be well to take a survey, first, of the 
historical relations of the two nations throughout the course 



12 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

of recent and indeed of modern history; secondly, of the 
actual state system of Europe, and the position and functions 
which they occupy within it. 

II 

It is only at the close of the long wars which marked 
the ruin of feudalism that true political relations exist between 
England and France as parts of a European body of states. 
From that time to the present, a period of 440 years, it will 
be found that whenever the policy of the two countries has 
been vigorous and wise, whenever they have both been 
fulfilling their natural functions in that body of states, the 
relations between them have been friendly and never directly 
hostile. On the other hand, whenever those relations have 
been hostile, it has been when one or other was pursuing a 
policy ruinous in itself, and which it has ultimately been 
forced to abandon. The wars of England and France 
mark, in fact, their grand crimes and blunders as nations. 
Their normal condition — the condition of their grandest 
national successes — is peace ; or rather, what is more than 
peace, co-operation. It is a significant fact, and one which 
we too seldom remember, that, mere military glory apart 
(which can be won in the worst as in the best of causes), 
all that is noblest as political achievement throughout the 
vicissitudes of European complications for four centuries, 
the policy of all the true statesmen who have left us a heritage 
of wisdom, has been characterised by the maintenance of 
union with France. 

Our greatest statesmen and their greatest statesmen — 
those whose policy we now can profitably recall — all uni- 
formly combined in this. It has been repudiated only by 
those whose policy has been cancelled by events. The preju- 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE I3 

dices which have sprung from our ancient and from our 
recent triumphs in war are so strong on us that propositions 
like these are regarded as a paradox. They form, however, 
rules without any true exception. There have been times 
when the policy of England, or when that of France, was in 
desperate defiance of all their duties and their traditions. 
At such moments the weight of the other has been thrown 
into the opposite scale, and furious contests have ensued. 
But their normal relations have been those of peace. And 
no broad survey of history can obscure the truth that, from its 
consolidation in the fifteenth century down to the latter half of 
the reign of Louis XIV., the general tendency of the French 
monarchy has been towa ds harmony with the English. 

The patience and address with which the sagacious 
Louis XL averted the vainglorious invasion of Edward IV., 
the transparent want of purpose that invasion betrayed, the 
anxiety of Louis for peace, the ease with which the English 
king and his council allowed themselves to be cajoled, mark 
the close of the long national feud, the substitution of nations 
for fiefs, and statecraft for military adventure. The French 
policy of Henry VIII. is little but a repetition of the conduct 
of Edward. There is the same pretentious invasion, the 
conventional war-cry, the same willingness to treat, the same 
mutual respect and desire for peace. With the Louises, 
Ferdinands, and Henrys of the fifteenth century these con- 
flicts were due rather to inveterate habit than to active 
animosities ; and they had too similar and too arduous duties 
at home to make any of them very desirous of serious wars. 
With the sixteenth century — the age of Henry VIIL, 
Francis, and Charles V. — the actual state system of Europe 
comes clearly into view. We have now the existing national 
limits, definite international relations, and permanent ob- 
jects of state. 



14 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

It may be difficult in the confusion which precedes the 
first great settlement to trace exactly any intelligible policy ; 
but amidst all the kaleidoscopic complications of the time 
there stands out clearly the growing importance of England 
in the European system, the preponderance which at any 
moment it can give to France, the immense force of both of 
them united, and the real affinity of their true interests and 
national objects. Capricious as was the policy of Francis 
and that of Henry, personal and trivial as were the motives 
which often controlled it, it was in the main the policy of 
natural allies and not of natural enemies. Cui adhareo 
prcEest was the famous motto of Henry, — a motto as true 
now as it was then. It did not mean the destruction of 
France. And when at last Henry threw in his lot with the 
captive Francis at his worst strait, and enabled him to re- 
cover his kingdom, he instituted a great maxim of policy, — 
that England has an interest in having her neighbour at 
once progressive and strong, for France has with England 
the joint protectorate of Europe against absolute dominion 
and retrograde oppression. 

With the growth of the power of Charles V. (whose life 
is justly taken as marking the rise of our modern state sys- 
tem) there comes into view clearly the principle which for 
the three succeeding centuries has more or less distinctly 
formed the clue to European history. In spite of serious 
exceptions and perturbations, a clear tendency appears that 
the conservative forces, both spiritual and temporal, should 
gather round the House of Austria, and centre in South 
Germany and Spain ; that the progressive forces are jointly 
or alternately led by England and France ; whilst Italy and 
the whole left bank of the Rhine form at once the battle- 
ground and the prize. During the sixteenth century, for 
the most part, the temporal struggle is lost and drowned in 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 1 5 

the spiritual. Political antagonisms and aflfinities are 
merged in the religious. The death-grapple of the two 
faiths was nerved by a special fanaticism, which overrides 
all the combinations of policy, interest, and reason. Yet 
in the midst of these convulsions the same general tendency 
is at work. France in the struggle is torn into two factions ; 
her position is nullified ; and her strength paralysed, 
whilst she is preparing for the middle ground which in the 
religious aspect of the great contest she has ever since 
maintained. 

England, if not so equally divided, sways backwards 
and forwards with still more violent revulsions. In the 
meantime the House of Austria is still the centre of the 
religious as of the political reaction. From time to time some 
Philip or Catherine steals in, like the genius of evil, to lure 
England or France into opposite camps. From time to 
time the very existence of states seems lost in the violence of 
civic disintegration. The deadly struggle in which the life 
of our great sovereign Elizabeth was passed might well 
have blinded a mind less capacious and calm to the true 
affinities of states. But in the worst of her straits, in spite 
of the danger to her person and her people, in spite of the 
fanatical hatred with which both were assailed by the court 
party of France, neither Elizabeth nor her ministers ever lost 
sight of the truth that England and France in the European 
system are not natural enemies but natural allies. Yet this 
great truth, which civil convulsion and religious frenzy for 
a time had obscured, broke forth only into clear light when 
France had shaken off the fever of reaction, and the wise 
and noble policy of Henry IV. had begun to restore her to 
health and vigour. 

The spirit of that great king was well met with that of 
the great queen ; and history can give us no finer instance of 



1 6 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

political sagacity than we see in the hearty and confiding 
alliance of these two consummate rulers. "She was another 
self," said Henry; "the irreconcilable enemy of my irre- 
concilable enemies." Indeed, if we were to search for the 
type of the natural attitude of the Governments to each 
other, we could have no better form of it than in the history 
of this period. Mutual confidence and respect, a generous 
spirit of co-operation, a consciousness of a common duty, 
but a spirit always tempered by watchfulness and caution, 
was the spirit in which they assumed their protectorship of 
Europe. This is not the place to analyse or weigh the famous 
Political Design of Henry, the scheme for the pacification 
and settlement of Europe. Nothing would be more mistaken 
than to regard it as the chimera of one visionary brain. The 
scheme was thoroughly reduced to practical working. It 
had gradually won its way into the cautious mind of the 
veteran Sully. It received the actual adhesion of a large 
proportion of the European Powers, and nothing but the 
dagger of Ravaillac prevented its immediate execution. 

But the scheme, as we read it in Sully, was as thoroughly 
that of Elizabeth as it was that of Henry. She had been 
the earliest and the staunchest maintainer of the central 
purpose of the design. It was impossible without the active 
co-operation of England; and on the death of Elizabeth, 
Henry regarded it as almost annihilated. This is not the 
place to decide upon its wisdom or its practicability. It 
may be that, as a reconstructive system, it was impossible 
or premature ; but the idea on which it rested is an idea as 
definite as it is true. That idea is the reality of the system 
of states in Europe, the necessity for their harmony and 
co-operation, the leading part which her history and position 
give to France in the common councils of Europe, the need 
of an intimate alliance with England, and the conviction, 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 1 7 

that with both combined the cause of good government, 
progress, and peace resides. 

The conception of the greatest of the French kings long 
ruled the policy of French statesmen. This grand, if prema- 
ture, idea was maintained by a series of ministers, wise, or 
respectable at least, down to the time when the tumid ambi- 
tion of Louis XIV. ruined his country and blotted out his 
dynasty. Neither that deplorable catastrophe nor the de- 
lirium of the revolutionary wars have succeeded in destroying 
it ; and it remains now, what it was two centuries and a half 
ago, the deep conviction of thoughtful minds on both sides 
of the Channel, and the true key of European politics. 

For a moment the fanatical party which struck down the 
great Henry in the full maturity of his wisdom succeeded in 
perverting from its path the public action of his beloved 
country. Their tenure of power was long enough to com- 
plete that ill-starred marriage with the House of Austria — 
that adulterous mingling, it has been said, of the blood of 
Henry and of Philip. But the genius of France, as though 
aroused by this outrage, lived again in the spirit of the great 
successor of Henry; he who, with yet greater difficulties, 
carried on the same work with yet greater power — the most 
successful of modern statesmen — the profound and majestic 
Richelieu. For twenty-six years the policy of France was 
directed on one unbending but sagacious system, which 
almost created France as a nation, if it did not create its 
national character, and which certainly for a century and a 
half stamped its impress on the history of Europe. The first 
act of Richelieu as minister was to announce the return to 
the policy of the late king, and to attempt to reopen the 
English alliance by the marriage with Charles. At the close 
of his unbroken career the ground was already prepared for 
the settlement which resulted in the peace of Westphalia; 



1 8 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the settlement which for two centuries has been, and still in 
some sense is, the basis of the state system of modern Europe ; 
the settlement which half realised the design of Henry, which 
his design might possibly have accomplished without the 
thirty years of carnage. 

The policy of Richelieu is far too strongly marked and too 
well understood to need any commentary here. It is a policy 
so systematic in principle and so rich in its actual fruits that 
it may be taken as the typical and historical policy of France. 
As such we can judge it. The policy of France was again 
in the hands of a great man, and again it was a policy in 
substance the same. The policy of England is no longer in 
the hands of a great ruler, but becomes utterly incoherent 
and contemptible under the intriguing bigotry of the race of 
Stuart. But the policy of France is not altered; France 
again assumes the leadership of the progressive movement 
in Europe, and again, as a first condition, solicits the active 
co-operation of England. The help meet for him, which 
in a later generation he might have found in the political 
genius of Cromwell, Richelieu was forced to eke out by the 
mere military genius of Gustavus. The influence of Eng- 
land under the Stuarts was nothing except when it was evil. 
But in spite of the sore trials to his principles, in spite of 
the vacillations, bigotry, and falseness of the wretched Stuart 
courts, in spite even of the demagogic support of La Rochelle, 
Richelieu was never betrayed into a hostile attitude to Eng- 
land, never even overlooked the inherent strength of her 
position. The English prisoners at Rhe were sent home 
honourably; no reasonable opportunity of peace was neg- 
lected; and the whole system of the most systematic of 
modern statesmen supposes cordiality and union with 
England. 

That system was only not carried out with the full co- 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 1 9 

operation of England because for the time, in her own internal 
convulsions, England was withdrawn from action abroad. 
But it was carried out, if not with England herself, with the 
natural allies of England, — by the same means, to the same 
end, and with the same spirit with which, both before and 
afterwards, the name of England was identified. In the 
hands of Richelieu the policy of Henry was modified and 
developed, but it was essentially the same. To concentrate 
and complete the greatness of the country without yielding 
to the lust of covetous aggression ; to conciliate and balance 
the rival fanaticisms in religion without giving victory to 
either; to rest the frontiers of states on geographical and 
national bases; to establish liberty of conscience without 
political anarchy ; to humble the reactionary dynasties with- 
out unlimited revolution ; to determine the final ascendency 
of the progressive over the retrograde system ; and to make 
France the heart of this action by giving her a moral rather 
than a material empire — such, in brief, was the work of the 
great dictator. 

The policy of Richelieu was one so solidly based that it 
suffered scarcely any interruption by his death; and again, 
for eighteen years, his system was continued by his servant 
and pupil Mazarin. The irregular conditions and the inferior 
capacity of this ministry rob that system, if not of its success, 
at least of its dignity and distinctness. The characteristic 
intrigue, the shifting combinations, and the personal mean- 
ness which disfigure the statecraft of Mazarin, are but too 
often repeated by the anecdote-mongers of history as the 
substance, and not as the adjunct, of his policy. Viewed by 
a broader light, it was but the legitimate continuation of the 
policy of Richelieu, as that was the legitimate continuation 
of the policy of Henry. The weapons of the bygone chiefs 
tremble in the feebler hands of their successors. But they 



20 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

are yet sufficient for their work. How right and systematic 
the task was, the closing triumph of the life of Mazarin — 
the treaty of the Pyrenees — draws in most striking lines. 

When we see the ruler of France — even an Italian, a 
churchman, and a cardinal — the virtual author of the 
most concentrated of autocracies, allying himself with the 
English Republic, with the acknowledged head of Protes- 
tantism, and jointly with him labouring towards a common 
object, securing the degradation of the great Spanish des- 
potism and the definite ascendency of France, we recognise 
the grand current of affairs shaping itself to its determined 
course across all the minor obstacles of individual wills and 
disturbing accidents. Internal difficulties and the complica- 
tion of interests for a time separated the chief imitator from 
the great rival of Richelieu ; but as soon as they thoroughly 
understood each other, so soon as the relations of states 
grew definite, the policy of Mazarin and of Cromwell was 
convergent and not antagonistic. Both were in the deepest 
sense traditional, both were intensely national, and both 
essentially systematic. And it is of high historical signifi- 
cance that in orbits so different we find their common pro- 
gression so similar. 

But Mazarin, with all his claims as a politician, can as 
little compare with Cromwell in true sagacity as he can in 
greatness of purpose. The greatest of the Protestant chiefs 
was also among the foremost of modern statesmen. Those 
who look with immoderate pride on our distant dominions, 
and with immoderate fear on their ultimate abandonment, 
are the men who mistrust the true greatness and strength of 
Britain and its inhabitants. Such may learn a useful lesson 
by turning to the position which England held in Europe 
under Cromwell — England, without Indian, American, or 
Australian empires; without Gibraltar, without Malta, with- 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 21 

out Hong Kong, and without one of those thousand posts 
where the British flag now studs the Pacific and the Asiatic 
Oceans. 

A few years of a great man's rule raised her from utter 
insignificance and abasement, to be in material strength 
among the first, in moral purpose the first of the nations of 
Europe, the leader of free civilisation and the destinies of 
the West, the hope and help of the oppressed, the curb of 
the tyrant. Trammelled as he was by his narrow creed, and 
fired by the national lust for maritime aggrandisement, the 
policy of the great Protector abroad tended at times to 
fanaticism, at times to injustice; but into one error, how- 
ever imminent, he never fell. He never mistook the truth 
that the Catholicism of France was, in its way, no less pro- 
gressive than the Protestantism of England; that the true 
ends of both countries could not be served by opposition; 
that their cordial union was essential to the security and 
welfare of Europe. As Richelieu had continued the policy 
of Henry in France, Cromwell recalled to life the policy of 
Elizabeth in England ; and the lives of the two wisest of the 
modern rulers of England, and the two wisest who, in modern 
times, have ruled France, thus fall in their main notes into 
perfect harmony and natural sequence. 

We come now to the disastrous epoch when all union 
was destroyed by the fatal influences which had long 
been gathering within and around the doomed monarchy of 
France. 

The latter portion of the reign of Louis XIV., as the 
pacific influence of the great Colbert declines, brings us to 
this disastrous change. It is no less than the contradiction 
of the policy which the great men of France had upheld for 
a century, and the annihilation of her well-earned place and 
influence. The later years of the Grand Monarque form 



22 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

just that period of her history in which France is the farthest 
from the true political leadership of Europe, at the lowest 
point of her national greatness. Spurred on by his own 
arrogance and by intriguing bigots, the king, whose duty it 
was, and whose pride it had once been, to follow the steps 
of Henry IV. and Sully, of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Colbert, 
passed over with his whole force to the enemy ; called round 
himself the retrograde powers which it had been the glory 
of his throne to have curbed, and used the influence which, 
to protect Europe from oppression, had been conceded to 
France, in the very work of making France the oppressor of 
Europe. 

South Germany practically passed over to the side of 
freedom, and France inherited and extended the sinister 
traditions of Spain. Dazzled by the power which his prede- 
cessors had won in the cause of progress, he turned its 
forces to the cause of repression. For Europe nothing was 
left but signal retribution on the apostate dynasty; and the 
heroic resolution of the great Dutch chief, in whom lived 
again the antagonist of Philip, and the daring genius of 
Marlborough, gave us the few amongst our triumphs over 
France to which Englishmen can look back with unmixed 
pride. 

The true headship of Europe, moral and intellectual, 
which the character and genius of Elizabeth and of Crom- 
well for a season had twice before given her, passed over for 
a season distinctly to England. During the whole of the 
century preceding the Revolution, the movement of Europe 
is speculative, religious, industrial, and social, rather than 
political. Political action is feeble and confused, and but 
one great character occupies the field. Yet whilst it is plain 
that England bore a large, at times the largest, share in the 
scientific and industrial movement, in the political sphere she 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 23 

no less manifestly possessed the casting vote, the reserve 
force, the ultimate appeal of Europe. 

During the period of ignoble intrigue which intervenes 
between the peace of Utrecht and the French revolution, it 
would be useless to look for any high, or indeed any settled, 
political purpose. In the collapse of all political aims and 
convictions, the relations of states are reduced to a mere 
struggle for material advantages, on the side of England to 
a blind and profligate struggle for maritime ascendency and 
colonial empire. This much, however, is clear. The criminal 
extravagance of Louis XIV. once bitterly avenged, France 
tends feebly to recover her natural ground; and the English 
and the French statesmen, or rather the feeble diplomatists 
of the day, again tend towards a real alliance, watchful and 
broken as it was. Walpole indeed — a statesman whose 
sagacious zeal for the general welfare of England outweighs 
the corrupt means with which he bent a corrupt aristocracy 
into reason — succeeded during the long years in which he 
governed England in maintaining unbroken a cordial alliance 
with France. When the jealousy of a worthless cabal forced 
him to surrender, first his principles and shortly afterwards 
his power, it was Spain, not France, which was the object of 
the national antipathy, or rather of the national cupidity. 

The triple alliance, the quadruple alliance, both equally 
point to the fact that, though the old European parties are 
almost extinguished, the tradition of England and France as 
allies against the reactionary powers was not wholly for- 
gotten. It is even some compensation to France for the 
humiliation of enduring such rulers as the Regent, Dubois, 
and Fleury, that they had the good sense to cling fast to this 
principle ; so that their ignoble scheming was far less injurious 
to their country than that of the ambitious bigots who suc- 
ceeded them. Unhappily the direction of France passed 



24 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

into the hands of men who, to corruption hardly less than 
theirs and with far inferior vigour, added the retrograde 
ambition of Louis XIV. France again, under the guidance 
of incorrigible fanatics or the creatures of royal debauchery, 
is seen to pass to the side of the oft-stricken House of Austria 
and the Bourbons of Spain. Aghast at the sight of the new 
Prussia, which by a happy return to her traditionary policy 
France had assisted to found, the blind successors of Riche- 
lieu joined in the ill-starred coalition to crush the only 
modern king who was worthy to be his peer. 

England, in the main, corrects the balance which the 
wretched incapacity of French policy is continually un- 
settling. In the main her action in Europe, always more 
pacific than those of the other states, though for causes 
which do her small honour, tends in Europe to the side of 
order, freedom, and national independence. Beyond the 
limits of the Western system, it is true, her policy is one 
long and dark story of colonial aggression and commercial 
rgipacity. But within it she maintains the part which, with 
the superior advantage of her position, France had in the 
previous century more systematically supported. She resists 
the reactionary ambition of Spain; she steadily opposes all 
further extension of the House of Austria ; she cultivates the 
alliance, where it is possible, of France ; she is favourable to, 
but watchful of, the rise of Prussia ; she interferes to prevent 
the premature and selfish dismemberment of Austria herself; 
she turns again to prevent the tyrannical attempt at the dis- 
memberment of Prussia. In every treaty and almost every 
alliance her might is felt; in the main it is exerted in the 
interests of European progress, her deeper energies and 
thoughts being concentrated upon the task of founding her 
colonial empire. 

It is a policy which, had it been followed consistently by 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 25 

free statesmen and not by successions of parliamentary parti- 
sans, might have been accounted almost wise; and had it 
been less deeply vitiated by the lust of mercantile aggrandise- 
ment, might almost have been remembered as honourable. 
Illumined now by the sterling sense of Walpole, now by the 
grand but over-weening character of Chatham, now by the 
heroism of Rodney and Wolfe, — with all its vices and its 
virtues, it was the policy of an aristocracy which, whilst 
offering to the middle classes as the price of rule the plunder 
of the seas and of the East, was not wholly incapable of 
directing the action of a free and progressive people. Un- 
stable and personal as that policy was, and at times fright- 
fully unscrupulous, it was frequently betrayed into hostility 
with France ; but no reasonable student of history can judge 
it when taken in the main as anything but the feeble repro- 
duction of the policy of our greater statesmen, — the policy 
of upholding the course of liberty and national independence 
in Europe against the retrograde powers and against attempts 
at violent aggression. Assuredly no candid mind can judge 
it (again when looked at broadly as a whole) as a policy of 
settled antagonism to France, as based on any deep difference 
of principle or any inveterate antipathy of race. 

Such was the state of things at the moment of the great 
crisis, — the long-gathering revolution of Europe. The 
whole fabric of the degenerate monarchy of France, with 
the spiritual and temporal forces which had gathered round 
it, was overturned; and the wrongs which the Louises and 
their courtiers had done to France, to peace, to freedom, and 
to reason were fiercely avenged. The violence of the crisis 
was extreme ; but it was clear then, and it grows ever clearer 
to us now, that amidst it France was working out the legiti- 
mate issue of her whole past and entering on the system of 
the future. Again, and now in a far more emphatic manner, 



26 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the genius of French civilisation carried her to the head of 
the European movement; and this time it was a headship 
at once political, social, and intellectual. She had to call 
into life and to sustain the principle of rule in accordance 
with national necessities, which has remodelled, and is still 
remodelling, the state system of Europe; she had the yet 
more difficult and the longer task of reconstructing society 
on the basis of organised labour; she had the leading part 
in the most arduous task of all, that which both precedes and 
must systemise the rest, — the task of reducing into practice 
the new philosophy of society, which the progress of Euro- 
pean thought had evolved; she had undertaken to lead the 
way towards the regeneration of the political doctrines, of 
the national unity, of the social system, — the law, the ad- 
ministration, the industry, and the religion of Europe. The 
effort was made most imperfectly and most stormily, with 
the aid of the leading minds and characters of Europe con- 
sciously co-operating for a century, in spite of organised 
opposition without and chaotic confusion within; and Eu- 
rope still owes to her a debt of gratitude for the sacrifices and 
agonies she endured in the spasms of this momentous birth. 
The true nature of this great movement, and the part 
which England might have played in it, was seen by the 
greater spirits, and by the national instinct in this country 
and elsewhere, and felt even by the abler section of our 
governing aristocracy. Unfortunately for England and for 
the world, the voice of Fox and Macintosh was drowned by 
the selfish terrors of the dominant majority, and the whole 
force of England was thrown into the reactionary scale. 
The tragic pathos of Burke and the lofty resolution of Pitt, 
in doing battle for the ancient order, almost blind us yet to 
the fatal badness of their cause. Many a doomed system 
has given a sort of melancholy grandeur to its last defenders. 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 27 

But neither the character nor the genius of Cicero, of Pope 
Sixtus, of Parma, or of Strafford can make us forget that 
their success would have arrested the progress of mankind. 

After the mean and hesitating policy of preceding states- 
men, there is something of at least grand fanaticism in the 
furious attack of England on revolutionary France, and un- 
questionably much that is heroic in the latter period, when 
the war had become one of liberty and of defence. The 
English aristocracy committed the blunder and the crime 
which had ruined the monarchy of France, with even less 
ground of excuse and (to Europe) far more disastrous result. 
At the close of the seventeenth century the ambition of Louis 
XIV. had attempted to use the position which the history of 
his country had given him in the work of destroying that 
position and undoing that history. At the close of the eigh- 
teenth the panic of the governing class of England turned 
the force which, in the name of industry, progress, peace, 
and freedom, they were permitted to direct, to the task of 
crushing out a new phase of all of these at once. Doubtless 
it was a revolution, and a portentous one — one destined to 
modify their whole position and power — which they were 
called upon to welcome. But they were themselves the prod- 
uct of a successful revolution, and were forced by every 
principle they asserted to carry it to its natural conclusion. 
Deliberately, at the most critical moment of modern history, 
they chose the wrong cause; and again, of the two nations 
the leaders of civilisation, one passed over with its whole 
force to the side of the enemy. 

That the official course of English policy was on the 
wrong side, has been demonstrated by events. Temporarily, 
outwardly, its resistance was successful. It succeeded in re- 
establishing the ancient monarchy; it succeeded in crushing 
and almost in proscribing the new spirit. In the blind settle- 



28 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

ment known as the Treaties of Vienna they thought to 
establish the old order permanently. Every act of that 
settlement has been undone and is undoing before our eyes. 
The successors of the English reactionaries are now leagued 
with the successors of the revolutionary chief to carry out the 
principles which that revolution inaugurated. It is in vain 
now to point to the fatal and frightful extravagances which 
accompanied the actual crisis. The revolution was carried 
out under conditions so adverse and special that no judg- 
ment can be passed as to how far these extravagances were 
inherent in it or were induced by circumstances. The 
French nation were forced to carry out the greatest and 
most arduous of all social changes under foreign aggression 
more formidable than any modern people has endured. 
France, in a word, was martyred by and for her sister 
nations. 

To the careful student of the Revolution, the spasms of 
the Reign of Terror keep cadence, beat for beat, with the 
tramp of the foreign invaders. The culminating agony of 
the struggle within coincides almost to a few days with the 
height of the danger from without. As Europe advances in 
arms, the murders in the prisons begin; as the coalition 
thunders forth its threats, the delirium is at its height; as 
the defeated invaders retreat, the guillotine descends. 

It is in vain also now to pretend that the Coalition itself 
was a work of defence. It is a pretext too shallow to be now 
repeated that France in the hour of her extreme prostration, 
— utterly disorganised, without an army or a navy, govern- 
ment or supplies ; without credit, money, or resources, — 
was becoming a danger to Europe, was meditating general 
aggression or dominion. The trope of her great leader, 
Danton, is as true as it is wild. France only took up the 
gage of battle that was hurled at her, and flung down before 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 29 

Europe the head of a king. But the attack on France was 
no more one of legitimate defence than the attack of the 
northern autocrats on Poland was defensive. In both cases 
it was a conspiracy at once to crush out a freedom which 
they dreaded, and to divide the spoil which they coveted. 
Never had people been so cruelly and wantonly bested. 
Having in pursuit of a dominant idea disarmed herself and 
reduced herself almost to helplessness, with scarcely a trained 
soldier under her standards or a general of division who 
could be trusted, France found herself the object of attack 
from a coalition of almost every state in Europe, with four 
or five armies of as many Powers upon her soil, her officials 
corrupted, her provinces stirred into revolt, her ports blockaded, 
her commerce destroyed, her fortresses razed, her soil honey- 
combed with foreign conspiracies, her name, her national 
character, government, institutions, and principles held up 
to violent invective from every corner of Europe, half a 
million of men in arms with the avowed object of annihilat- 
ing her as a nation, and fomenting with rancorous energy 
every form of civic confusion, discord, and treachery. 

And this was done in the name of a cause which the right 
hand of that Coalition has utterly discarded. Of late years, 
in the eyes of certain schools, England has been even more 
identified with the leading principles of this great change 
than France herself. Mistaken as this is, it serves to show 
how completely England has abandoned the Coalition. 
With or without the aid of England, as a fact the spirit of 
the Revolution, in a moral sense, has triumphed. The 
principle that the permanent good of the entire people is 
paramount; that nations have no solid basis except as they 
represent the wants and desires of an aggregate race; that 
all rule is tyrannical which is alien to the popular will ; that 
national greatness is based on industrial and not on military 



30 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

activity; that public life must come to embrace all members 
of the nation, educated, trained, and organised for this end ; 
that by steady but incessant steps the whole of our modern 
institutions, European, national, and social, must be re- 
modelled upon the new basis, — such are the principles 
which are now the very maxims of all who believe at once in 
progress and in order, whether in France or England, in any 
part of civilised Europe; and these are at bottom the prin- 
ciples of the Revolution. Until these principles are frankly 
accepted by those who rule this country, and until they still 
further acknowledge that with France lies their initiation 
and their earliest and fullest development, the action of 
England in Europe must remain vacillating, inexplicable, 
and neutral. 

This spirit has already deeply penetrated the brain and 
the conscience of this country; but its cordial adoption by 
any political party will at once make that party the natural 
directors of its policy. The traditional Whig statesmen 
have just courage enough to repudiate the language of the 
Coalition, but not enough to welcome the vital strength of the 
Revolution. All who refuse this are disqualified at once for 
any useful foreign policy. But the moment that those who 
rule here have determined to adopt it, the relations of England 
and France at once become consistent, intelligible, and 
cordial. Their historical attitude is resumed; they again 
pursue their common work with the same spirit, but in dif- 
ferent modes — the common work with which the greater 
rulers of each country are closely identified ; the work which 
for three centuries they have carried on without serious 
interruption, except on the two occasions when the arrogance 
of Louis and the conservatism of Pitt drove their respective 
people headlong on the path of evil. 

The monstrous ambition of Napoleon was the sinister 



ENGLAND AND FEANCE 3 1 

result of the Coalition wars. And grievously have France 
and Europe paid the penalty. England took a foremost 
part in the necessary task of crushing the new tyranny of 
Napoleonic Imperialism. Since the peace the history of 
the relations of England with France is the history of the 
renunciation of all the principles with which the Coalition 
entered into war. In a moral sense, and to the political 
student, France has redressed her material defeat by the 
triumph of her social ideas. Waterloo has been thrice 
avenged by the victors combining with the vanquished to 
enforce the principles of which that battle-field was once 
thought to be the grave. Every one of the great acts of the 
drama of European history has been a fresh gain to the 
cause of the Revolution, to that of nationality, republicanism, 
social and international fraternity; public opinion, justice, 
and moral right. Since the days of Canning, whether di- 
rected by Whig or Tory politicians, it has been a question 
only whether the policy of England should welcome these 
principles with greater or less frankness. 

So soon as the military ambition of Napoleon and his 
bastard imperialism was crushed and the bitterness which 
its suppression produced was extinct, the policy of England 
and France reverted to its ancient convergence of purpose, 
and both resumed something of their natural functions. The 
negotiations respecting Poland in 1831, abortive as they were, 
and feeble as they exhibit the statesmen of England to have 
been, bring before us France again in her former position 
as the promoter of the cause of freedom and nationality 
in Europe, but as hoping to succeed in it only through the 
co-operation of England. On each occasion on which the 
undying Polish struggle has been felt — in 1846, in 1848, 
in 1855, and 1864 — the same thing has been seen, and on 
each occasion with increasing distinctness. Putting aside 



32 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the miserable squabbles arising out of extra-European em- 
broilments and dynastic intrigues, on the greater questions 
of European politics, the policy of England and France has 
tended to agreement in the interests of order and progress. 

That it has resulted in so little was due largely to the 
peculiar timidity of the politicians who directed the foreign 
policy of the two countries. During the convulsion of 1848 
the same causes were perpetually at work, but were deprived 
of any practical result by the same personal indecision and 
incoherence of aim. The accession of a strong hand to the 
policy of France, coinciding with something like a strong 
and popular administration in England, has for the first time 
enabled these principles to bear fruits of any worth. The 
Crimean war — begun by France mainly for dynastic and 
military, by England for commercial and Asiatic, ends — 
slowly became, under the forming principle of public opinion, 
and by sheer force of the natural truth of the relation, a really 
European movement, of which France and England were 
at once the heads and the arms. Unsatisfactory as much of 
this policy is, it was at bottom the combination of the West 
for European objects imder its natural leaders. 

To the perplexity of some of the politicians engaged, the 
closing phase of this war, in the Conference of Paris, showed 
a moral dignity and foresight which for the first time realised 
in outline the future congresses and settlements of the West. 
The regeneration of Italy, the natural sequence of the Con- 
ference of Paris — which forms with it the bright side of the 
second empire — is but a continuation of the same policy. 
In spite of jealousies and caprices, the restoration of Italy 
has been the work of England and of France together; a 
work to which Napoleon has given the initiative, but the issue 
of which is in the hands of the entire English and the entire 
French nation. In the Polish and Danish wars, in nearly 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE T,^ 

every European question which arises, the same principles 
are apparent. Now, as so often before, the nations seem 
to force this part spontaneously on the two heads of the 
Western system. That it hitherto has had results so small is 
due to the extreme difficulty of the situation and to the per- 
sonal prejudices of the politicians. To Napoleon III. it 
must be conceded that he has recognised this principle more 
steadily than any statesman in England or in France. His 
rule, for the first time in recent history, brought it to efficient 
results, and each year of it has strengthened and illustrated 
the principle. His strong and fixed desire for a European 
congress is but one form of it ; a desire which must one day 
be realised. In the meantime each year teems with proofs 
that the set of all public opinion in Europe and of general 
events is towards an active combination between England 
and France to realise without convulsion the necessary 
changes in its condition. 

Ill 

In the association of nations it requires little reasoning 
to show that England and France hold a preponderating 
place. By their material force, by their industrial greatness, 
by their national cohesion and energy, no less than by their 
traditions and their prestige, they are marked out as the 
twin chiefs of the European system. Great promise in the 
future is found in other nations and races. As great and 
even greater elements of moral or intellectual eminence 
belong to other people; but no reasonable mind can doubt 
that, for all the practical ends of actual politics, England and 
France have for the moment a distinct pre-eminence in 
Europe. In that union of innate strength, material resources, 
moral prestige, historical renown, and popular enlightenment 



34 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

which political leadership in these days implies, no other state 
at present can practically compare with these two (written 
in 1864). 

On every ground Russia can make no fair claim to such 
a place. As a power semi-oriental and semi-civilised she 
is clearly outside the pale of our modern political life. A 
nation still struggling in the throes of serfdom, and to the 
very existence of which a military autocracy seems essential, 
can interfere in the movement of our political activity to 
nothing but a sinister end. The heterogeneous soldiery of 
Prussia and Austria point to the bifurcation of Germany as 
a political force. Besides these, no other Power in Europe 
can pretend to the material and moral weight which a lead- 
ing Power must combine. On the other hand, the influence 
exercised both by England and by France in their respective 
spheres is very real and definite. The European state 
system itself is shaken by several conflicting principles, 
which complicate the relations of its members and often 
neutralise the action of the whole. 

Catholicism and Protestantism, with much diminished 
vigour, still control and agitate it on periodical occasions. 
The great religious struggle is being gradually lost in the 
new struggle of established Christianity against philosophy 
and science. But the antagonism of the Catholic and the 
Protestant interests, which in the minor questions of Euro- 
pean politics — in the development of Belgium, Scandinavia, 
Switzerland, and Spain — is constantly but irregularly at 
work, rises occasionally, as in the Polish contest, into a 
feature of extreme importance. It assumes even deeper 
significance in the whole Italian question and that of Papal 
independence, — a question which underlies and will out- 
last any temporary solution of the military occupation of 
Rome. 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 35 

An antagonism somewhat similar in its extent, somewhat 
deeper in its effects, though far less defined, is that division 
of race into the great classes of the Latin and the Teutonic. 
But easily as the feeling of race disappears or is neutralised 
under strong pressure, its subtle and persistent influence, 
so closely connected with every element of civilisation, pro- 
duces a real antagonism, or rather co-ordination, amongst 
the Powers of Europe. No practical statesman can afford 
to underestimate its force, for it expresses real and profound 
varieties of national character. And it would be an idle 
dream to suppose that a Latin and a Teutonic people will 
for ages exhibit the same affinity as that which exists between 
two peoples of the same origin. Connected with the religious 
and ethnological, and nearly identical in area, is another 
dualism — that between the peoples who have modified and 
retained the feudal organisation of society and those who 
have transformed it into a new social system; where the 
hierarchy of birth and ofhce is in full ascendency, as in Ger- 
many, or under legal and constitutional restrictions, as in 
England ; and where it has given place totally, as in France, 
partially, as in Spain and Italy, to social equality and military 
autocracy. 

Akin to this is the contrast between the principles of 
hereditary and of republican government, between nations 
with whom the aristocratic and monarchic system is in full 
vitality, as in Germany and England, and those with whom, 
as in France, the popular will reigns supreme, more or less 
identified with an individual dictator. There is, again, the 
struggle between industrialism and militarism; between 
a localised and a centralised form of administration ; between 
parliamentary and bureaucratic institutions. All of these 
are principles which combine to form something like a dual 
system in the Western group of nations, which divide them, 



36 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

more or less equally, and with many cross-divisions, into 
two camps. They are principles, moreover, which subdivide 
each nation within itself, and separate them into rival and 
counterbalancing parties. 

At the head of these two great groups of nations in Europe, 
of these two principles which divide each nation, stand 
respectively England and France. One or other of them 
is the fair representative and type of every one of these ele- 
ments of European society, though neither expresses them 
in a quite exclusive form. Round England centre the sym- 
pathies of all in Europe that is Teutonic, Protestant, con- 
servative, parliamentary, and commercial. France, in like 
manner, is the centre of the Latin, the Catholic, the democratic, 
the centralised, and the revolutionary element. The action 
of England and of France is so closely identified with these 
respective principles that neither Power alone can give any 
continuous support to a movement identified with the prin- 
ciples of the other party. 

Over the smaller seaboard peoples of Europe the influence 
of England is in the ascendant. Over Denmark, Holland, 
Scandinavia, over Portugal and Turkey, the prestige of 
England reigns as in a congenial soil. This is the result of 
an obvious identity of interest or pursuit, and the fact that 
these smaller Powers are in an especial manner brought 
face to face with her material strength and maritime dominion. 
Scandinavia, Holland, and North Germany see in her the 
principal and most systematically Protestant Power. Prussia, 
Holland, and Italy necessarily look towards her for the type 
of those parliamentary and constitutional systems which 
they seem bent on developing for themselves. It is part of 
the traditions of the Austrian crown that it owes its very 
existence to England ; and hateful to our ears as is the aristo- 
cratic dogma of our "ancient alliance" with Austria, to her, 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE ' 37 

in spite of her irritation, it is a grim necessity to cling to and 
to uphold. For to England turn the eyes of all who dread 
violent change, as well as of all who apprehend aggression. 
All feel that England is the only one of the great Powers of 
Europe who can gain nothing and who will not profit by 
dynastic and territorial revolution on the Continent. 

England (which in the East is the disturber of peace and 
rest) in Europe is naturally identified with commerce, in- 
dustry, and peace. Her government again, as the only 
government of Europe which has never suffered an external 
overthrow, and for two centuries has suffered no approach 
to an internal convulsion, is the great symbol of stability in 
the West. Her crown — by far the oldest and most illustrious 
of all the crowns of Europe, which was a great European 
monarchy at a time when Hapsburgs and Brandenburgs, 
Romanoffs and Dukes of Savoy, were robber chiefs; when 
Italy was a network of republics, Germany a collection of 
baronies, and Spain was occupied by Moors — is now, 
since the extinction of the shadow of the Roman Empire 
and the fall of the House of Capet, the great centre of all 
the historical traditions. In a word, England is felt to rep- 
resent and to support upon the Continent the sentiment 
of order, national stability, recognised law, and historical 
permanence, of personal freedom, of free speech, of equal 
justice, of administrative independence, the expansion of in- 
dustry, free trade, and commercial intercourse, the mainte- 
nance of ancient rights and resistence to wanton change, the 
independence of the smallest member of the European family 
of nations. It is a leading and a noble part that she plays 
amongst them ; though the least reflection will show that it is 
but one side of the European movement, but one element of 
our modern civilisation, of which she is the recognised organ, 
and that one not the most characteristic. 



38 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

We turn now to France, which in the other great side of 
the European movement possesses a still more unquestioned 
predominance. She is the recognised head of the Latin 
race, between the members of which, for several reasons, 
historical as well as political, there is a much stronger bond 
than exists between nations of Teutonic origin. She is still 
(1866) the head of Catholicism, partly as being by far the 
most powerful of the Catholic Powers, partly because she 
holds the Papacy in her hand. Quite apart from the actual 
muster-roll of her armies, which may vary with political 
circumstances and parties, she is at present the first military 
power of the Continent. None contest her claim to be the 
second naval power in Europe, not so much from the number 
and equipment of her ships of war, her Gloires and her 
Cherbourgs, but from the high aptitude of her sons for 
scientific warfare whether on land or sea, the extent of her 
coasts, the excellence of her ports, her commercial activity, 
and her ancient maritime traditions. In industrial develop- 
ment, in manufacturing energy, the French people are second 
only to ourselves, and if organisation and art are regarded 
in industry, quite our equals. All these are, it is true, but 
minor requisites of national greatness, but they are indis- 
pensable, and without them no nation can pretend, in our 
present state of opinion, to occupy a prominent -rank. 

The great distinctive feature of France as a nation is, 
however, the very simple one of her geographical position. 
Her border closely abuts on at least seven of the European 
states. In the system of Western Europe she distinctly 
occupies the centre, and is the only Power in close local 
connection with England. Local connection, of course, 
is of great importance in governing international relations. 
No one who reflects on the innumerable channels through 
which movements, social, political, and literary, radiate from 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 39 

Paris throughout Europe, can fail to recognise the importance 
of occupying this geographical centre. Let us conceive the 
relative weight of an insurrection or a change of government 
in Paris and in any other capital in Europe. There is but 
one city of Europe towards which gravitate the cultivated 
and thoughtful of every nation, in the movements, ideas, arts, 
and habits of which all take a greater or a less interest. 
Let us compare the relative degree of publicity and value 
which popularly attaches to any political scheme, any social, 
historical, or political theory propounded in Paris, and one 
propounded in any existing city. 

The Parisian press, publicists, and jurists alone can be 
called common to Europe. The undisputed acceptance of the 
French language as the common political and international 
medium is, if we give its true place to language, almost by 
itself decisive. Let Frenchmen assert a statement, however 
contrary to fact; promulgate a social system, however chi- 
merical; or be suspected of a design, however extravagant, 
all for a time will hold their ground in the mind of Europe 
with vitality out of proportion to their merit. It does not 
advance the question to insist that all this is but to the dis- 
credit of the other peoples of Europe; that they should 
travel to other cities, use some other language, read some 
other writers, study other arts, ideas, and movements than 
those of France. All we are now concerned with is the fact. 
As a matter of fact, taking one people with another and one 
subject with another, the bulk of the people of Europe do 
turn in the questions of social life in an especial manner to 
France. However various the causes, trivial or irrational as 
they may be, if politically and morally Europe can be said to 
be one whole, and if one whole, to have a common centre, 
the instinct of the greater number points for that centre to 
Paris. 



40 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

This is precisely one of those questions most likely to be 
embarrassed by strong prejudice, and on which, from na- 
tional feeling and from its own great complexity, it is most 
difficult to preserve a judicial fairness of mind. But no 
political writer would be worthy of the name who had not 
thoroughly weighed it with conscientious and patient dis- 
crimination. Let us try to correct any personal predilection 
and antipathy by the calm test of historical fact, and see if 
there be anything in the ancient position of France to explain 
or support her modern pretensions. A very simple question 
seems crucial. Can it be said that if the history of Europe 
since the fall of the Roman Empire be surveyed as a whole, 
this history would be so completely eviscerated by the loss 
of all mention of any other European country as it would 
be by the loss of that of France? Once blot France out of 
the historical map, and the history of Europe would become 
unintelligible. A slight effort of the imagination may assist 
us to understand the case ; and if we can conceive as effaced 
the very memory of Charlemagne, of the House of Capet and 
of Bourbon, of the first Crusade, of Louis IX., of Louis XI., 
of Henry IV., of Richelieu, Colbert, and Louis XIV., of the 
Convention, the Republic of '92, and of the two Napoleons, 
we can estimate the relative value of the residuum of European 
history. The country which for one thousand years has 
filled this space in the minds of men must have gained a 
real, if unrecognised, prerogative in the comitia of Euro- 
pean nations. 

Nor must another great peculiarity of France be over- 
looked. She is essentially European. Her interests and 
policy must necessarily be guided on European bases. Not 
so exclusively European that she is without points of contact 
with the other continents, she is still free from the embar- 
rassment and distraction which colonial and maritime inter- 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 4 1 

ests introduce into general questions. The extra-European 
interests of England are so enormous that they seldom leave 
her free to pursue a purely European policy. Russia, in one 
half of her vast dominions, is the mistress of mere Asiatics. 
Neither Prussia nor Austria have any interests beyond their 
own continent; but they are both so exclusively continental 
and inland, that it diminishes rather than increases their 
influence here. France, on the other hand, has enough to 
connect her with transmarine races, but not enough to dis- 
turb her action at home. Whilst England and Russia have 
wide maritime and Oriental interests, those of France are 
strictly continental, European, and concentrated. 

Yet another consideration, and one of an importance 
which it is almost impossible to exaggerate. In estimating 
the moral weight and even the material strength which any 
nation can bring to the great questions of European politics, 
nothing is more important than the greater or less degree in 
which they are chargeable with national oppression, and the 
character for moderation and unselfishness which they possess. 
Let us read the protocols of the Treaty of Paris of 1856, and 
contrast the moral weight of Count Buol with that of Count 
Cavour; and even remember the moral power of England 
at the Congress of Vienna, which her unselfish, though mis- 
taken, policy procured her. Of the actual five European 
Powers, England and France alone are decently free from 
this fatal weakness. The crimes of the Russian domination 
in Poland, Finland, and Turkey; of Austrian domination 
in Galicia, in Hungary, in Venetia; of Prussian domination 
in Posen and Denmark, identify these three Powers with 
oppression, and colour all their action and their character in 
Europe. 

On England herself the memory of her Indian aggressions, 
subjugations, and revolts, her Asiatic empire, her Chinese, 



42 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

her Japanese, her perennial colonial wars, her maritime 
pretensions, hang as a dead weight, dragging down her fame. 
There is but one modern nation which never closes the temple 
of Janus, and that nation is England. Nor can an old man 
recall the period at which British soldiers were not engaged 
in some corner of the world. We esteem ourselves happy if 
we chance not to be engaged in several. As I write, English 
soldiers are in the field in four distinct wars of race in as 
many great divisions of the globe. To us a source of pride 
as well as a supposed means of gain, these ceaseless foreign 
expeditions damage our honour in Europe as much as they 
disturb and weaken our policy. 

We have, too, our special weakness. Blinded by long 
habit, and conscious of at least good intentions in these 
latter years, the English nation forgets its position in Ireland, 
as that of a dominant race still hated by a subjugated nation, 
still alien in religion, manners, and traditions, and loaded 
by the memory of seven centuries of selfish misgovernment. 
We jest almost at the thought of being ourselves national 
oppressors at home, and for the moment our confidence is 
just. But Europe has not learned the difference between 
our government in Ireland now and our government as it 
has been for seven centuries; and the oppressors of the 
Magyar, the Venetian, and the Pole can still point biting 
retorts at the perplexed rulers of the Irish Kelt. 

France in Europe is almost free from any similar weakness. 
Her occupation of Rome is a special and complex case, 
which, with all its evils, is yet in its nature emporary, and not 
in its form oppressive. Her aggressions and domination in 
Algeria form a fatal wound in her side, less damaging to her 
than our own Oriental and maritime oppression, because 
neither so incessant nor so colossal, and not so injurious to 
mankind, not flung broadcast over the earth. This great 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 43 

wrong and cause of wrong, this grand national blunder, this 
wretched military and dynastic caprice, once repressed and 
undone, the case of France as an aggressor, but for Nice, 
stands almost clear. As it is (and this is for opinion almost 
everything) France is the only one of the five great Powers 
which, neither by alien domination nor imperfect incorporation, 
oppresses, insults, or misgoverns any one of the races of 
Europe; which has neither a Warsaw, a Hungary, a Venetia, 
nor a Posen, neither a Gibraltar nor an Ireland (written in 
1864). 

It is but a corollary of this which appears in her wonderful 
national cohesion and unity. France may be said to be the 
only perfectly homogeneous nation in Europe. Russia with 
her cancer in Poland, Austria with her wen in Hungary, 
stand at one end of the scale; France stands at the other. 
The Spanish and the Italian populations are both cohesive 
in a high degree ; but the unity of neither is equal to that of 
France. The Piedmontese and the Neapolitan have not yet 
learned to feel as the children of one fatherland; the Moor, 
the Goth, and the Kelt in Spain are not yet wholly amalga- 
mated. Prussia with her patchwork of duchies; Austria 
with her hostile races; little Switzerland with her trilingual 
feuds; even England with her Irish difficulties, can none of 
them pretend to the complete fusion, the organic unity, the 
intense concentration which binds together as one man the 
forty millions of the French race. 

But there is another consideration of a very different kind, 
which, were all the preceding conditions different from what 
they are, would suffice to mark off France as possessing a 
special function in Europe. In France is found the origin, 
the centre, and the impulse of that Revolution which is as 
truly European as it is French. This is not the place to 
analyse or discuss this great historical movement ; it is suffi- 



44 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

cient for our purpose that it is an axiom acknowledged by 
all competent inquirers, that this Revolution is at once the 
issue of the past and the cradle of the future civilisation of 
Europe; that France is but the scene of its acute crisis, the 
centre from which it is destined to radiate through the Euro- 
pean system. 

The thorough comprehension of this, the key of all modern 
history, is the first and indispensable qualification for a states- 
man; and the vacillations and helplessness of the politicians 
of the old school are mainly due to the fact that they attempt 
to deal with the problems of Europe whilst ignoring the first 
conditions of their solution. To officials bred up in the 
purblind doctrines of Pitt and Castlereagh the French Rev- 
olution may appear as a mere national rebellion, once big 
with portents and horrors, but long since crushed or exhausted. 
It is time that politicians saw it, as historical students see it, 
to be a real regeneration of modern society, of which as yet 
nothing but the initial convulsions are past, and in which as 
yet but one people has fully participated. 

That Revolution in its political aspect implies the abolition 
of every form of hereditary government, whether resting on 
force, tradition, class, or caste, and the substitution for it of 
a government of personal fitness, actively recognised by the 
governed, and maintained by them in the sole interest of the 
common social progress. This involves the gradual ex- 
tinction of all modes of political rule derived from birth, of 
the hereditary principle in all its phases, whether monarchic, 
feudal, or industrial, and the resettlement of the state system 
on national and geographical bases. It implies in its social 
aspect the extinction of the arbitrary classification according 
to the aristocratic hierarchy, and the substitution of the natural 
classification of personal merit. In its moral aspect it implies 
the subjection of individual propensities to a recognised code 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 45 

of social duty. In the intellectual aspect it implies a common 
system of belief, resting on free and accepted demonstration, 
and the maintenance of that faith by an organised system of 
education. 

This conception, as a whole, of a regenerated social exist- 
ence has penetrated in a general way France alone among 
the nations, and even her but incompletely. Yet no un- 
pledged observer doubts the degree to which it has modified 
the others, and the certainty of its ultimate establishment in 
all. Those who watch events from the ground of history 
rather than party can see in the spasm which shook Europe 
in 1830; in the revolutions which convulsed it in 1848; in 
the revulsion of public opinion since the close of the great 
war which separates us as by a gulf from the ideas of Alex- 
ander, Pitt, and Metternich; in the resurrection of Italy as 
a nation ; in the revival of Spain ; in the unrest within the 
German principalities ; in the mode in which the movements 
and ideas of Europe react on our own home politics and 
thoughts, and still more on those of others; in the subter- 
ranean surging of the revolutionary forces from Glasgow to 
Naples, from Warsaw to Madrid, the sure signs of this 
stupendous movement, its might, and its centre-point. And 
a politician is distinctly disqualified for his task who ignores 
the importance of this principle in all political questions 
whatever, or ignores the truth that France is at once its em- 
bodiment and its apostle. 

It results from all the preceding considerations — from 
her geographical position, from her military, naval, and 
industrial renown, from her language, history, literature, 
and general prestige, from the spontaneous adoption of her 
ideas, tone, and aims, but chiefly from her being the centre 
of the great movement — that France possesses a priority or 
initiative in the progressive civilisation of Europe, very diffi- 



46 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

cult to define with exactness, but which cannot be gainsaid. 
In a subject like this, nothing can be less in place than 
puerile comparisons between nations ; but only the shallowest 
vanity can prevent us from determining the relative duties of 
each nation. England and France, like the rest, have each 
their parts; and neither would be competent to fulfil the 
office of the other. No thoughtful reader will see in this 
statement any crude classification of nations, or the affecta- 
tion of adjudging absolute inferiority or superiority to any. 
All that is here implied by the initiative of France is the truth 
visible in present facts, and naturally to be expected from 
the survey of the past, that most of the ideas which move 
modern society are first or most strongly enunciated in 
France; and, on the other hand, that what the French 
people proclaim is received, on the whole, with the largest 
share of attention by the rest of Europe. 

A statement so simple and so like a truism can scarcely 
awaken the most sensitive self-love; and Englishmen may 
explain it as they please, but they can hardly venture to 
deny it. It amounts to little more than to say that principles 
adopted in France are expressed in a form and language 
and with an energy which are most favourable to their dis- 
semination; and, on the other hand, that no people in 
Europe have so immediate a machinery for carrying their 
ideas am.ongst others. The people who within the last one 
hundred years succeeded in pouring their victorious armies 
over five countries of Europe simultaneously, and raised an 
empire (in a measure an empire of ideas) coextensive with 
the western half of the Continent, have earned for any poHcy 
that they espouse a very special interest. And the country 
which represents the greatest number of the interests of 
modern European nations, and whose movements are most 
rapidly felt by the greatest number of those nations ; which 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 47 

possesses the most numerous relations with them, and stands 
most nearly in an intermediate position in the antagonisms 
which agitate them, is naturally that country the action of 
which most powerfully determines that of the rest. That 
country is obviously France; and if we attribute a distinct 
initiative in Europe to her, it is but to resume the familiar 
notion that in the public questions of Europe the attitude of 
France is awaited as of critical importance. 



IV 



So far from France and England having been natural 
antagonists, so far from enmity or even rivalry having been 
their normal condition, they have been, in the higher sense 
of political sympathies, inseparable colleagues and natural 
allies. The greater rulers of both countries have systemati- 
cally encouraged friendship between them. From the Middle 
Ages down to the Coalition against the Revolution of 1793, 
the two countries have never been engaged in any obstinate 
and ineradicable antagonism of policy, except when all 
Northern Europe was banded to crush the headlong am- 
bition of Louis XIV. It may be said, if we except this 
period, that England has never exercised any influence in 
Europe at once commanding and beneficent, unless she has 
been acting in concert with France. The very notion of the 
natural antipathy and contrast between ourselves and our 
neighbours is a remnant only of the retrograde passions 
which inspired the Coalition of Pitt. To speak of France as 
a natural antagonist is the part of men whose views of state- 
craft are drawn from the later ravings of Burke, to whom 
history has no lessons earlier than Marlborough. Calmer 
reasoning and broader knowledge bring us to the very 



48 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

opposite belief. And if the decade 1855-65 did much to 
extinguish these irrational prejudices, it is due not to the 
Napoleons or Palmerstons, nor even to commercial treaties 
and Oriental alliances, but to the fact that the calming of 
the revolutionary movement in France has coincided with 
its progress in England ; that as the area of its influence has 
been widened, the violence of its action has been reduced; 
and France and England have been drawn together in their 
natural task of co-ordinating the progress of Europe. 

It has been growing up as a maxim with a certain vigorous 
and honest body of politicians, that the true policy of a coim- 
try like England is to withdraw almost entirely from diplo- 
matic or national action in any state of Europe; that her 
sole duty is to be friendly with all, to have alliances and 
even relations with none. That such a paradox should 
have obtained any support, that it should have seduced the 
most conscientious and sagacious of our public men, is a 
singular proof of the disorganisation of all political doctrines. 
Nothing but the aimless meddling into which our former 
diplomacy degenerated can explain such a blunder in men 
of the high moral and intellectual vigour of Mr. Cobden and 
Mr. Bright. Seeing, as they do, that in the hands of aristo- 
cratic statesmen of the old school political action on the 
Continent ends in little but spiritless meddling, without 
vigour, system, or principle, they might well be forgiven for 
believing that no end can be put to such a course but by a 
period of rest and abstinence. 

But for any end less temporary a real and systematic 
foreign policy is absolutely essential ; and the only effectual 
mode of closing the era of weak and restless intervention is 
to substitute for it a system of definite action. Mr. Cobden 
and Mr. Bright have been deceiving themselves, or are 
deceived. They have been in this but the mouthpiece of a 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 49 

party to which they are themselves immeasurably superior. 
Their own objects and motives have done honour to their 
genius; but the real scheme of the apostles of peace and 
non-intervention at any cost is to make national well-being 
consist in the unrestricted development of individual industry. 
Free trade, peace, commerce, industry, are with them the 
ends, not the means, of public prosperity. The happiness 
of nations does not consist, any more than that of men, in 
the free accumulation of capital. Growing rich is to a 
people just what it is to a man. Civilisation means a great 
deal more than labour, and more than material wealth and 
industrial cultivation. It means the uniform education of 
the human powers, whether in communities or in man ; and 
of these the social and generous instincts are the highest. 
It implies an intricate social union; control, government, 
and association; it cannot exist without mutual support, 
trust, and co-operation; the protection of the weak by the 
strong; the subordination of the unwise to the wise; the 
combination of all in common duties ; the sacrifice of many 
personal desires; the willingness to bear the common 
burdens. 

These trite maxims of common morality, which, what- 
ever we may practise, all of us recognise in private life, yet 
require to be repeated when we deal with public and national 
concerns. As applied to the members of a nation, no one 
gainsays or misconceives these familiar truths. The blindest 
votary of the new doctrines does not propose as a panacea 
for our public difficulties that every man should confine him- 
self to 'the affairs of his own county, his own city, or his 
own parish. Pushed to its extreme, the total disregard of all 
social interests is admitted to be the meanest form of self- 
ishness. But if citizens have national duties, they have, for 
just the same reasons, international duties as well. There 

E 



50 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

is nothing mysterious about the aggregate we call a nation. 
The aggregate which forms the state system of Europe is 
just as real, and if it is somewhat less definite, it is in some 
points of view decidedly more important. The progress of 
civilisation for us depends ultimately and in the long-run 
even more upon the state of Europe than on the state of 
any particular nation. The moral, intellectual, and indus- 
trial growth of England, speaking in the highest sense, is 
determined by that of the West as a whole. If by moral 
growth we mean a wiser and more generous public opinion ; 
by intellectual growth, the more systematic cultivation of the 
whole mental powers; by industrial growth, not the mere 
accretion of capital, but a happier organisation of labour 
(and no lower estimate is worthy of thinker, politician, or 
citizen), then we may be sure that the progress of our people 
in these things is never very far removed from the progress 
of the people around us. 

From the other nations of Europe, we draw the raw 
stuff of our civilisation, material, scientific, and educational. 
Thought is absolutely common to us all. The highest 
scientific and philosophical truths which ultimately form our 
intellectual standards, and without which even manufactures 
would stand still, come to us in far larger proportion from 
across the seas than from this island. We carry abroad 
freer conceptions of commerce, and we benefit by the lessons 
we have taught. We come back with teaching on the con- 
dition of the labourer, and we profit profoundly by our 
study. The political afiinities are no less powerful. Good 
government amongst our neighbours is a dangerous example 
for bad government at home. The triumph of progress and 
freedom there gives new life to our political activity. Nor is 
this less true of the other nations in their turn than it is of 
ourselves. This intercommunion of tone, aims, and ideas 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 5 1 

permeates all alike. If Englishmen have the closest rela- 
tions with their neighbours in Europe, scientific, educational, 
moral, industrial, and social, they cannot avoid having 
political relations also. 

Civilisation is a very complex whole. A healthy political 
condition is one of its indispensable conditions, as of all 
living men our two popular leaders have most earnestly 
maintained. A diseased political state will arrest and dis- 
tort for a time every other kind of development. Industry is 
but a side of the work of civilisation, and it is just that side 
of it which convulsion or s>Ticope of the political organism 
can most effectually damage. The regeneration of Euro- 
pean society, the working out of the people to a better state, 
a time of peaceful union, industrial organisation, and uni- 
versal education — for this is the true meaning of the great 
Revolution — is a movement eminently European, and not 
national or local. But one of its first conditions, one of its 
most important results, is that of political regeneration and 
national resettlement. And this is no less European than 
the still wider movement of which it is but a part. Each 
nation is interested alike in the good government of all. 
Without it peace, commerce, and progress are impossible. 
Each nation also can do much to promote it. But the mode 
in which it alone can do so systematically and effectually is 
by generous and resolute co-operation in the common coun- 
cils of all. Few nations can with advantage interfere in the 
separate affairs of a neighbour; but all together, and that 
by means no less peaceful than efficient, can give the most 
powerful impulse to good government in any, and can cer- 
tainly guarantee it from interference from without. 

It would not be difficult to show that on purely economic 
grounds the consequences of national isolation would prove 
most disastrous. Liberals complain — and most justly — 



52 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

of the enormous growth of our military and naval expendi- 
ture. Fortifications and engineering experiments are fa- 
vourite resources to gain popularity for a minister or a 
party ; but to make any grand reduction in our armaments 
whilst France and the rest of Europe are still armed to the 
teeth, is a plan to which no tongue whatever can persuade 
our people to submit. But the armaments of France are 
directed not so much against us as against Continental 
Powers. The army of France is kept on foot chiefly by the 
armies of Germany. These exist because Italy, Poland, 
and Hungary at any moment may renew the effort for 
national existence. The House of Austria is still invol- 
untarily, as in the days of Henry, the source of the uneasiness 
of Europe (1864). It has no further function in Europe, 
and retards and disturbs its progress. The army of Austria, 
again, is the cause, but not the excuse, of the army of Prussia. 

Prussia, uneasy for her empire, watches with mingled 
dread and hope the political throes of the German Powers. 
Each petty sovereign keeps up his army from old feudal 
pride and conscious insecurity. But another and even 
more powerful cause remains. Outside this German fron- 
tier, beyond the pale of Western civilisation, the enormous 
hordes of the Russian despot stand for ever under arms. 
Germany, which for political reasons distrusts the West, for 
military reasons must turn with defiance to the East. Thus 
the great Continental armies exist, and will exist until the 
political ulcers are excised, and until union gives Europe 
strength to disregard the Oriental legions of Russia. 

Agreement between France and England could do much, 
and much at once, to mitigate this evil of "militarism" (as 
Garibaldi, the noblest soldier of our age, has called it), 
which drains and poisons our industrial energy. But noth- 
ing can well suppress it except the one remedy of political 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 53 

resettlement. Whilst Russia, revolution, and nationalities 
alternately threaten Germany, she will have her million and 
a half of bayonets on foot. Whilst she has these, France 
will have her half million, and England her quarter million. 
The evil is not with us two so much as with the retrograde 
Powers of the East. It springs not so much of aristocratic 
misgovernment or monarchic pride as of a chronic political 
unrest. To end this alone is to pass from a military to an 
industrial epoch. To mitigate its convulsions, to moderate 
its violence, is to do much to neutralise its evils, immediate 
and remote. When Europe is settled politically and nation- 
ally, her armies will be disbanded, but not till then ; and 
only as we co-operate in obtaining for her and for ourselves 
this political and national resettlement — a state which shall 
at once be order and progress — can we approach the time 
when the British nation will consent, even if it previously 
were able, to cut off the scandalous profusion of our military 
expenditure. 

Now whilst entire apathy to the political movement of 
Europe is felt by all bu| a few fanatics to be a course as 
degrading as it is extravagant, there is still cherished by a 
certain school the idea of founding a system of complete 
neutrality. That idea is that, whatever relations with foreign 
countries England is to maintain, they are never to exceed 
a passive goodwill and a studied impartiality. The com- 
merce of all nations should be welcomed in her ports, as the 
ports of all nations should be opened to her commerce. An 
interchange of capital, the intercourse of the citizens, the 
exchange of products, and international exhibitions, should 
give what is wanting of noble to this bond of material interest. 
Each bale of goods, cries the able financier, comes bearing a 
message of friendship. Such a view as this, if meant for a 
political principle, savours either of the cant of the rhetorician 



54 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

or the pettiness of the tradesman. That commercial can 
override poHtical questions permanently is an idea to which 
no one with the instinct of a statesman could yield. 

The buying and selling of articles amongst the people of 
a nation does not necessarily involve the fusion of all classes 
and the extinction of all political struggles. No one can 
regard the history of Europe and its present condition in 
the light of such a sketch as has preceded, without recognis- 
ing in it as a whole the unity and method of a state system, 
and the great scale of the forces with which that system is 
charged. Compared to them, the crude motive of mercantile 
profit (which has been the stimulus often of the most selfish 
and ruinous extravagances) is indeed uncertain and futile. 
In international precisely as in national movements those 
who take part must stand on definite political principles, 
and take some definite attitude towards the great ideas or 
social changes which are at stake. Human society, on the 
largest as on the smallest scale, is far too complex and noble 
to be reduced to the measure of any market whatever; and 
it is as absurd to look for the solution of all political ques- 
tions in Europe, even by the advent of a Millennium of 
Free Trade, as it would be to hope to quell a revolution at 
home by a reduction of discount. 

Real neutrality in all European movements being practi- 
cally impossible for this country, let us examine some of the 
chief political relations which have been advocated or pur- 
sued. In that absence of any intelligible principle — which 
has so long marked our vacillating policy — almost every pos- 
sible alliance has been tried or recommended by ministries 
and parties. It was even once the idea of a school of half- 
hearted reactionists to associate ourselves in an intimate 
manner with Russia. An alliance with Turkey or China 
would be hardly more absurd. As Russia differs from Eng- 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 55 

land in every social, political, and historical condition (to 
say nothing of her being outside the state system of Europe), 
to associate our policy with hers is simply to appeal to the 
old method of material force, and to retire ostentatiously 
from the field of opinion, progress, and moral weight. The 
party which regards Russia as anything but as a Power whose 
ambition must be watched whilst its barbarism must be edu- 
cated, is at once unfit to bear rule or give counsel in a free 
and advancing nation. 

An alliance with Prussia, or even North Germany, which 
has been occasionally suggested, must appear, at any rate in 
the light of recent events, as an alliance which leaves simply 
out of the question the whole of the Catholic revolutionary 
and democratic forces of the Continent. It would offer none 
of the stability and strength of the Russian alliance, whilst 
it shares in part many of its evils. The same reasoning 
applies just as forcibly, and, in spite of the traditions of an 
effete school, is far more applicable to the Austrian alliance — 
that with the South rather than the North of Germany. 
Indeed, so hopelessly is the empire in its present form doomed 
to extinction, so thoroughly identified is it with all that 
remains of reactionary in Europe, that to identify our policy 
with hers, even in subordinate matters, is to look to secure 
the stability and progress of Europe by identifying ourselves 
with the interests of its most rotten element. The voice of 
all that is reasonable and liberal in England has been for a 
generation so loudly pronounced against this remnant of our 
worst system of blundering, that it is as little worth discussing 
an alliance with South Germany as with North Germany. 
A united Germany, as a political unit, of all the German- 
speaking peoples, "the Pan-Germanic idea," is as yet a 
professor's dream (1864). 

An alliance or permanent relations with any of the other 



56 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

European powers need hardly detain us for consideration. 
Any one or more of these smaller nations, however proper 
to receive our friendship and help, cannot seriously be pro- 
posed as a basis of combination. A continental policy for 
England obviously implies relations with one of the first- 
rate Powers. There is, however, another alternative. There 
remains to be considered another political connection, which 
at first sight offers far more than any of those which have 
been considered, and is vigorously advocated by a powerful 
and able party. The creed of the only political school of 
growing importance is an intimate alliance with America — 
an alliance at once political, social, and material — or in its 
full form a combination of the entire Anglo-Saxon race. 
By this would be implied a close identification of interest, 
and a combined action of all the races of the globe which 
speak the English tongue. The conception has a solid truth 
at its base, and is a fruitful and intelligible principle. There 
can be no doubt that such a moral union would be a very 
desirable, a very feasible, and a very pregnant consumma- 
tion. It would lead to great and valuable political ends. 
It would certainly represent an enormous force, material as 
well as moral, and a vast expansion of industrial life. 

For all this, however, it is not, and can never be, a cardinal 
political idea. An Anglo-Saxon alliance, however intimate 
and however powerful, never can reach to the level of the 
true European questions. It is not a harmony or balance 
of elements and interests, it is simply the augmentation of 
one. With all the points of difference, the Anglo-Saxon 
race is, for all European purposes, virtually one. It repre- 
sents one set of ideas, of political forces and affinities. The 
whole of the elements represented by France still remain 
outside of it. Anglo-Saxonism is, after all, an idea, hke that of 
Panslavism, Teutonism, or the Latin race; an idea which 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 57 

has a real basis, but is exaggerated into absurdity. It is 
only a variety of national egoism. Anglo-Saxondom will, 
and even now does, represent a preponderating material 
force; but as a key of human progress it is a vaunt or 
an imposture. There would remain outside of it, and 
without defined relation to it, the whole of those problems 
of the European state system with which the Continent is 
big. 

The reorganisation of Germany, the repression of Russia, 
the revival of Italy and Spain, the resettlement of Europe, 
the grand political and social crises of France, the bulk, in 
fact, of the intellectual, social, and practical movements of 
Europe, would be things at which the Saxon union would 
look on, but which it would not be vitally concerned in or 
able essentially to modify. Looking at the region of ideas 
and the moral forces of nations, it would bring England little 
nearer to the real life of the West. No one but a man 
driven crazy by national vanity could suppose that the true 
solution of all European difficulties would be at once ob- 
tained, if England were suddenly doubled in population, 
wealth, and energy. And speaking in the light of Euro- 
pean progress as a whole, the coalition of America and 
England would do little more than this. America is, after 
all, another self, freed happily from many of the burdens of 
its parent, but devoid also of much of its laborious educa- 
tion in civilisation. America, like England, has her place 
— a great and a noble part — amongst the heads of human 
progress; but that part is as the colleague and counterpart 
of England. The function of each is not the complement 
of the other. And it is only an age infatuated with material 
success which can claim for the material development of 
America an influence on the destinies of Europe akin to 
that which eight centuries of effort and of growth, their 



58 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

European position, relations, and traditions have given to the 
Anglo-Saxon people of this island. 

In point of fact, the union of America with England, 
such as it is conceived by the economic school of politicians, 
would be by itself rather a curse than a blessing to the rest 
of the human family. Valuable as that union would be 
when subordinated to greater political relations and fixed 
international duties, a mere league of the two branches of 
the English race, to push their settlements, their trade, and 
their influence to indefinite limits, would indeed be a formi- 
dable bar to human progress. It would mean England prac- 
tically withdrawn from all her legitimate duties in Europe; 
for her enormous power would be the principal menace to 
the combined nations, whilst it gave her but small means of 
controlling them. It would mean political progress drowned 
in the torrent of industrial expansion. It would mean a 
maritime supremacy ten times more tyrannical and galling 
than of old ; more empires founded in the East ; more races 
of dark men sacrificed to the pitiless genius of Free Trade, 
and at the blood-stained altar of colonial extension. It 
would mean the subversion of ancient kingdoms, the de- 
moralisation of primitive societies, the extermination of un- 
offending races. If the great national shame and danger, 
which it behoves every patriotic Englishman to avert, be, as 
I solemnly believe it to be, the growth of mercantile injustice 
in our empire, this shame and danger would be largely in- 
creased, were England to gain at once an enormous increase 
of power and a stimulus to her material lusts. America thus 
would add to her impunity whilst encouraging her vices. 
Valuable as Anglo-Saxonism is as part of a wider system of 
political combinations, to substitute it by itself for such a 
system would be the surest road to national decline. 

By this method of logical exhaustion we come back, there- 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 59 

fore, to the only possible and rational basis of English policy, 
a close understanding with France. It is easy to see how 
natural and solid such a policy is — paramount in its advan- 
tages not in one respect, but in all respects. In the first 
place, whilst it is most true that the Western Powers form a 
system of themselves, it has been shown to be no less obvious 
that there is in this system a certain dualism, and that of 
this dualism France and England are the foremost repre- 
sentatives. As far the most powerful of the actual Euro- 
pean nations, as far the most advanced, as far the most 
stable, these two nations form, for the moment, an order by 
themselves. However desirable it may be that the state 
system, which is even now morally one, should become 
politically one or legally consolidated, it would be Utopian 
to expect common European action, or even standing Euro- 
pean councils or congresses, for many a generation. In the 
meantime a settled understanding and a healthy co-opera- 
tion between England and France is possible, and may well 
represent and do duty for the other. Nor is this simply a 
vision of the future. 

When the two Western Powers allied themselves to defend 
Constantinople and Eastern Europe from the Tartar, in 
spite of the indecision and incompleteness of their action, in 
spite of the selfish aims and the petty intrigues from which 
neither was free, in spite of the opposition and alarm of 
Germany — it was felt that the Crimean war was an under- 
taking in the name and interest of Europe, which could only 
be closed by a European conference, and which opened a 
new European epoch. Secondly, the extreme diversity of 
England and France enables them together fairly to repre- 
sent and to harmonise the principal elements of European 
society. In the next place, their interests are so far dif- 
ferent, and yet so far from antagonistic, that any common 



6o REALITIES AND IDEALS 

course which they take cannot be far from the interests of 
the rest of Europe. France can never abet England to 
estabhsh a tyranny outside of Europe; nor could England 
abet France in establishing one within it. 

Now what is here meant is not an alliance with France, 
or mere friendliness towards France, much less flattery of 
the actual rulers of France, — rather a well-considered 
agreement with the French nation upon the main features 
of their joint policy. It would be quite possible for the 
directors of the two nations, if at all worthy of the name, to 
lay down broad paths of action on all the chief European 
questions, which should duly satisfy the interests of both, 
strengthen the moral and the material position of both, and 
yet awaken none of the jealousies of their neighbours. It 
need scarcely be said that such an agreement, prepared as a 
whole and honestly proclaimed, could not possibly comprise 
schemes prejudicial to the other Powers, or referring exclu- 
sively to the selfish interests of either. Neither could have 
the smallest interest to assist the other in aggression, spolia- 
tion, or tyranny. Nor could they agree for mutual aid to 
such ends; for each would feel even more indignation in 
such a scheme in the other than it would feel satisfaction in 
being abetted in such a scheme itself. 

The various projects of national aggrandisement justly 
and unjustly attributed to France would one and all be 
distinctly repudiated and provided against. England on her 
part must surrender and disclaim the actual or the imputed 
wrongs against the rights of her neighbours with which she 
is charged, — be it Gibraltar, be it Malta, be it the empire 
of the seas or imperial arrogance. It would be easy for both 
nations to give up these objects of vulgar ambition or irra- 
tional pride in exchange for greater and more lasting objects 
of national glory. That in this stage of civilisation they 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE 6 1 

Still disturb the ideas and the acts of two great nations is 
due chiefly to the utter state of disorganisation to which 
the European state system is reduced, and to the rebuffs 
which the better hopes and efforts of each so continually 
meet from the other. The failure of these is due, however, 
mainly to this, that England and France are constantly en- 
gaged in carrying out a policy without the aid of, occasionally 
in spite of the opposition of, the other. 

The great fact of a permanent understanding between 
England and France, when once distinctly proclaimed, would 
alone suffice to achieve or prepare most of its happiest re- 
sults. So soon as it was really understood throughout Eu- 
rope that England and France had definitely concluded a 
comprehensive agreement on all the greater questions of 
policy, formally renouncing or abandoning all pretensions 
odious or menacing to other states, publicly engaging to use 
their vast resources and their legitimate influence in concert 
for the general settlement of the state system in the cause 
equally of order and progress, many of the principal per- 
plexities of the Continent would be in a fair way towards 
solution at once. The preposterous projects with which 
desperate reactionists and revolutionists in turn trouble the 
harmony of the West would be little heard of, when all were 
aware of a settled determination on the part of the two great 
heads of Europe that she should be delivered over neither 
to oppression nor to anarchy, but that the gradual resettle- 
ment of states into a new and completer system of liberty 
should be carried on without recoil and without confusion; 

Russia, who has so long traded on the jealousies and in- 
trigues of the West, would at last abandon her long dream 
of aggression upon Europe. Austria would reconcile her- 
self to treat for Venetia, and prepare herself for her trans- 
formed existence. Prussia, that Russia of North Germany, 



62 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

would see that no fresh divisions would enable her to pursue 
unchecked her ambitious career. Italy would at once feel 
absolutely guaranteed against the pressure of her friends or 
the aggressions of her enemies, and would turn to national 
restoration, relieved from the intrigues which are due to the 
one, and the military incubus which is caused by the other. 
Spain would recover her pride, develop her enormous re- 
sources, without the necessity of courting the rulers of 
France, of flouting those of England, and of tyrannising 
over petty outlying nations. The smaller nations one and 
all might look for a real insurance against oppression, and 
might learn to trust to opinion instead of to intrigue. The 
partisans of the old system, their cause visibly lost, would 
learn resignation. The partisans of the new, their cause 
taken out of their hands, would learn patience. Peace, 
trade, and civilisation would gain, not by commercial treaties, 
but by a healthier political atmosphere. Who shall gainsay 
that such results do not incomparably transcend the vulgar 
and shifting objects of ambition which each Power in its 
isolation now alternately pursues? 



Postscript, June 1908. — The foregoing Essay, written in 
1864, was published in 1866 in International Policy, a joint 
volume of seven "Essays on the Foreign Relations of Eng- 
land" (Chapman and Hall, 8vo — second edition, 1884, 
i2mo). It will be remembered that it was composed be- 
tween the Crimean war and the Franco- German war, at a 
time when the German Empire did not exist, and Prussia 
was but the leading State of North Germany ; when Austria 
dominated Italy, and oppressed Hungary; when France 
occupied Rome. After forty-four years I reissue it in the year 
of European ententes to which I looked forward not in vain. 



II 

THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 

The system of thought on which this entire series of Essays 
is based seeks to moralise and to spiritualise the great insti- 
tutions of society — not to revolutionise or to materialise 
them. In nothing is this character more conspicuous than 
in its teaching as to the social Future of Woman. It is in- 
tensely conservative as to the distinctive quality with which 
civilisation has ever invested women, whilst it is ardently 
progressive in its aim to purify and spiritualise the social 
function of women. It holds firmly the middle ground 
between the base apathy which is satisfied with the actual 
condition of woman as it is, and the restless materialism 
which would assimilate, as far as possible, the distinctive 
functions of women to those of men, which would "equalise 
the sexes" in the spirit of justice, as they phrase it, and would 
pulverise the social groups of families, sexes, and professions 
into individuals organised, if at all, by unlimited resort to 
the ballot-box. Herein we are truly conservative in holding 
society to be made up oi families, not of individuals, and in 
developing, not in annihilating, the differences of sex, age, 
and relation between individuals. 

But first, let us get rid of the unworthy suspicion that we 
are content with the condition of women as we see it, even 
in the advanced populations of the West to-day. As M. 
Laffitte has so well put it, the "test of civilisation is the place 
which it assigns to women." In a rudimentary state we 
find women treated with brutal oppression, little better than 

63 



64 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

slaves or beasts of burden, where the conditions of existence 
make such tasks almost a cruel necessity for all. In many 
societies of a high civilisation, from the point of viev/ of 
intellectual activity or military organisation, the condition of 
women is often found to be one of seclusion, neglect, or humili- 
ation, moral, physical, and intellectual. Even to-day, under 
the most favourable conditions — conditions, perhaps, more 
often found in some sections of the labouring classes of 
cities rather than amongst the spoiled daughters of wealth 
and power — it is shocking to see how backward is the 
education of women as a sex, how much their lives are over- 
burdened by labour, anxiety, and unwomanly fatigues, by 
frivolous excitement and undue domestic responsibility, 
by the fever of public ambitions and cynical defiance of all 
womanly ideals. 

No ! we can never rest satisfied with the current prejudice 
that assigns to woman, even to those with ample leisure and 
resources, an education different in kind and degree and 
avowedly inferior to that of men, which supposes that even 
a superior education for girls should be limited to a moderate 
knowledge of a few modern languages, and a few elegant 
accomplishments. This truly Mahometan or Hindoo view 
of woman's education is no longer openly avowed by cultured 
people of our own generation. But it is too obviously still 
the practice in fact throughout the whole Western world, 
even for nine-tenths of the rich. And as to the education 
which is officially provided for the poor, it is in this country, 
at least, almost too slight to deserve the name at all. For 
this most dreadful neglect let us call aloud for radical relief. 
We call aloud for an education for women in the same line as 
that of men, to be given by the same teachers, and covering 
the same ground, though not at all necessarily to be worked 
out in common or in the same form and with the same practi- 



THE FUTURE OE WOMAN 65 

cal detail. It must be an education, essentially in scientific 
basis the same as that of men, conducted by the same, and 
those the best attainable, instructors — an education certainly 
not inferior, rather superior to that of men, inasmuch as it 
can easily be freed from the drudgery incidental to the prac- 
tice of special trades, and also because it is adapted to the 
more sympathetic, more alert, more tractable, more imagina- 
tive intelligence of women. 

So, also, we look to the good feeling of the future to relieve 
women from the agonising wear and tear of families far too 
large to be reared by one mother — a burden which crushes 
down the best years of life for so many mothers, sisters, and 
daughters — a burden which, whilst it exists, makes all 
expectation of superior education or greater moral elevation 
in the masses of women mere idle talk — a burden which 
would never be borne at all, were it not that the cry of the 
market for more child labour produces an artificial bounty 
on excessively large families. And to the future we look to 
set women free from the crushing factory labour which is the 
real slave-trade of the Nineteenth Century, one of the most 
retrograde changes in social order ever made since Feudalism 
and Church together extinguished the slavery of the ancient 
world. In many ways this slavery of modern Industrialism 
is quite as demoralising to men and women, and in some 
ways as injurious to society, as ever was the mitigated slavery 
of the Roman Empire, though its evils are not quite so start- 
ling and so cruel. 

These are the wants which, in our eyes, press with greatest 
urgency on the condition of women, and not their admission 
to all the severe labours and engrossing professions of men, 
the assimilation of the life of women to the life of men, and 
especially to a share in all public duties and privileges. The 
root of the matter is that the social function of women is 



66 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

essentially and increasingly different from that of men. 
What is this function ? It is personal, direct, domestic ; work- 
ing rather through sympathy than through action, equally 
intellectual as that of men, but acting more through the 
imagination, and less through logic. We start from this — 
neither exaggerating the difference, nor denying it, but rest- 
ing in the organic difference between woman and man. It 
is proved by all sound biology, by the biology both of man and 
of the entire animal series. It is proved also by the history 
of civilisation, and the entire course of human evolution. 
It is brought home to us every hour of the day, by the in- 
stinctive practice of every family. And it is illustrated and 
idealised by the noblest poetry of the world, whether it be 
the great epics of the past or the sum of modern romance. 

It is a difference of nature, I say, an organic difference, 
alike in body, in mind, in feeling, and in character — a 
difference which it is the part of evolution to develop and 
not to destroy, as it is always the part of evolution to develop 
organic differences and not to produce their artificial assimi- 
lation. A difference, I have said ; but not a scale of superior- 
ity or inferiority. No theory more than ours repudiates 
the brutal egoism of past ages, and of too many present men 
of the world, which classes women as the inferiors of men, 
and the cheap sophistry of the vicious and the overbearing 
that the part of women in the life of humanity is a lower, a 
less intellectual, or less active part. Such a view is the refuge 
of coarse natures and stunted brains. Who can say whether 
it is nobler to be husband or to be wife, to be mother or to 
be son? Is it more blessed to love or be loved, to form a 
character or to write a poem? Enough of these idle conun- 
drums, which are as cynical as they are senseless. Every- 
thing depends on how the part is played, how near each one 
of us comes to the higher ideal — how our life is worked out, 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 67 

not whether we be born man or woman, in the first half of 
the century or in the second. The thing which concerns us 
is to hold fast by the organic difference implanted by Nature 
between Man and Woman, in body, in mind, in feeling, and 
in energy, without any balancing of higher and lower, of 
better or of worse. 

Fully to work out the whole meaning of this difference 
in all its details, would involve a complete analysis in An- 
thropology and Ethics, and nothing but the bare heads of 
the subject can here be noticed. It begins with the difference 
in physical organisation — the condition, and, no doubt in 
one sense, the antecedent (I do not say the cause) of every 
other difference. The physical organisation of women 
differs from that of men in many ways: it is more rapidly 
matured, and yet, possibly, more viable (as the French say), 
more likely to live, and to live longer ; it is more delicate, in 
all senses of the word, more sympathetic, more elastic, more 
liable to shock and to change; it is obviously less in weight, 
in mass, in physical force, but above all in muscular per- 
sistence. It is not true to say that the feminine organisation 
is, on the whole, weaker, because there are certain forms of 
fatigue, such as those of nursing the sick or the infant, minute 
care of domestic details, ability to resist the wear and tear 
of anxiety on the body, in which women certainly at present 
surpass men. 

But there is one feature in the feminine organisation 
which, for industrial and political purposes, is more important 
than all. It is subject to functional interruption absolutely 
incompatible with the highest forms of continuous pressure. 
With mothers, this interruption amounts to seasons of pros- 
tration during many of the best years of life : with all women 
(but a small exception not worth considering) it involves 
some interruption to the maximum working capacity. A 



68 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

perfectly healthy man works from childhood to old age, 
marries and brings up a family of children, without knowing 
one hour of any one day when he was not "quite fit." No 
woman could say the same; and of course no mother could 
deny that, for months she had been a simple invalid. Now, 
for all the really severe strains of industrial, professional, and 
public careers, the first condition of success is the power to 
endure long continuous pressure at the highest point, with- 
out the risk of sudden collapse, even for an hour. 

Supposing all other forces equal, it is just the five per cent 
of periodical unfitness which makes the whole difference 
between the working capacity of the sexes. Imagine an 
army in the field or a fleet at sea, composed of women. In 
the course of nature, on the day of battle or in a storm, a 
percentage of every regiment and of every crew would be 
in childbed, and a much larger percentage would be, if not 
in hospital, below the mark or liable to contract severe dis- 
ease if subject to the strain of battle or storm. Of course it 
will be said that civil life is not war, and that mothers are 
not intended to take part. But all women may become 
mothers; and though industry, the professions, and politics 
are not war, they call forth qualities of endurance, readiness, 
and indomitable vigour quite as truly as war. 

Either the theory of opening all occupations to women 
means opening them to an unsexed minority of women, or 
it means a diminution and speedy end to the human race, 
or it means that the severer occupations are to be carried 
on in a fashion far more desultory and amateurish than ever 
has yet been known. It is owing to a very natural shrink- 
ing from hard facts, and a somewhat misplaced conven- 
tionality, that this fundamental point has been kept out of 
sight, whilst androgynous ignorance has gone about claim- 
ing for women a life of toil, pain, and danger, for which 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 69 

every husband, every biologist, every physician, every mother 
— every true woman — knows that women are, by the law 
of nature, unfit. 

This is, as I said, merely a preliminary part of the ques- 
tion. It is decisive and fundamental, no doubt, and it lies 
at the root of the matter. It is a plain organic fact, that 
ought to be treated frankly, and which I have touched on as 
an incident only but with entire directness. But I feel it to 
be, after all, a material, and not an intellectual or spiritual 
ground, and to belong to the lower aspects of the question. 
We must notice it, for it cannot be disregarded; but it is 
by no means the heart of the matter. The heart of the 
matter is the greater power of affection in Woman, or, it is 
better to say, the greater degree in which the nature of 
Woman is stimulated and controlled by affection. It is a 
stigma on our generation that so obvious a commonplace 
should need one word to support it. Happily there is one 
trait in humanity which the most cynical sophistry has 
hardly ventured to belittle — the devotion of the mother to 
her offspring. 

This is the universal and paramount aspect of the matter. 
For the life of every man or woman now alive, or that ever 
lived, has depended on the mother's love, or that of some 
woman who played a mother's part. It is a fact so tran- 
scendent that we are wont to call it an animal instinct. It is, 
however, the central and most perfect form of human feeling. 
It is possessed by all women : it is the dominant instinct of all 
women; it possesses women, whether mothers or not, from 
the cradle to the grave. The most degraded woman is in 
this superior to the most heroic man (abnormal cases apart). 
It is the earliest, most organic, most universal of all the 
innate forces of mankind. And it still remains the supreme 
glory of Humanity. In this central feature of human 



70 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

nature, Women are always and everywhere incontestably 
pre-eminent. And round this central feature of human 
nature, all human civilisation is, and ought to be organised; 
and to perfecting it all human institutions do, and ought to 
converge. 

I am very far from limiting this glorious part of maternity 
in woman to the breeding and nurture of infants; nor do I 
mean to concentrate civilisation on the propagation of the 
human species. I have taken the mother's care for the 
infant as the most conspicuous and fundamental part of the 
whole. But this is simply a type of the affection which in 
all its forms woman is perpetually offering to man and to 
woman — to the weak, the suffering, the careworn, the 
vicious, the dull, and the over-burdened, as mother, as wife, 
as sister, as daughter, as friend, as nurse, as teacher, as 
servant, as counsellor, as purifier, as example, in a word — 
as woman. The true function of woman is to educate, not 
children only, but men, to train to a higher civilisation, not 
the rising generation, but the actual society. And to do 
this by diffusing the spirit of affection, of self-restraint, self- 
sacrifice, fidelity, and purity. And this is to be effected, not 
by writing books about these things in the closet, nor by 
preaching sermons about them in the congregation, but by 
manifesting them hour by hour in each home by the magic 
of the voice, look, word, and all the incommunicable graces 
of woman's tenderness. 

All this has become so completely a commonplace that the 
very repeating it sounds almost like a jest. But it has to be 
repeated now that coarse sophistry has begun, not only to 
forget it, but to deny it. And we will repeat it ; for we have 
nothing to add to all that has been said on this cardinal fact 
of human nature by poets, from Homer to Tennyson, by 
moralists and preachers, by common sense and pure minds. 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 7 1 

since the world began. We have nothing to add to it save 
this — which, perhaps, is really important — that this 
function of woman, the purifying, spiritualising, humanising 
of society, by humanising each family and by influencing 
every husband, father, son, or brother, in daily contact and 
in unspoken language, is itself the highest of all human func- 
tions, and is nobler than anything which art, philosophy, 
genius, or statesmanship can produce. 

The spontaneous and inexhaustible fountain of love, the 
secret springs whereof are the mystery of womanhood, this 
is indeed the grand and central difference between the sexes. 
But the difference of function is quite as real, if less in degree, 
when we regard the intellect and the character. Plainly, the 
intellect of women on the whole is more early mature, more 
rapid, more delicate, more agile than that of men; more 
imaginative, more in touch with emotion, more sensitive, 
more individual, more teachable, whilst it is less capable of 
prolonged tension, of intense abstraction, of wide range, 
and of extraordinary complication. It may be that this is 
resolvable into the obvious fact of smaller cerebral masses 
and less nervous energy, rather than any inferiority of quality. 

The fact remains that no woman has ever approached 
Aristotle and Archimedes, Shakespeare and Descartes, 
Raphael and Mozart, or has ever shown even a kindred 
sum of powers. On the other hand, not one man in ten can 
compare with the average woman in tact, subtlety of observa- 
tion, in refinement of mental habit, in rapidity, agility, and 
sympathetic touch. To ask whether the occasional outbursts 
of supreme genius in the male sex are higher than the almost 
universal quickness and fineness of mind in the female sex, 
is to ask an idle question. To expel either out of human 
nature would be to arrest civilisation and to plunge us into 
barbarism. And the earliest steps out of barbarism would 



72 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

have to begin again in each wigwam with the quick observa- 
tion and the flexible mind, and not with the profound genius. 

As with the intellect — so with the powers of action. 
The character or energy of women is very different from 
that of men ; though here again it is impossible to say which 
is the superior, and far less easy to make the contrast. Cer- 
tainly the world has never seen a female Alexander, Julius 
Caesar, Charlemagne, or Cromwell. And in mass, endurance, 
intensity, variety, and majesty of will no women ever approach 
the greatest men, and no doubt from the same reason, smaller 
cerebral mass and slighter nervous organisation. Yet in 
qualities of constant movement, in perseverance, in passive 
endurance, in rapidity of change, in keenness of pursuit (up 
to a certain range and within a given time), in adaptability, 
agility, and elasticity of nature, in industriousness, in love 
of creating rather than destroying, of being busy rather than 
idle, of dealing with the minutest surroundings of comfort, 
grace, and convenience, it is a commonplace to acknowledge 
women to be our superiors. And if a million housewives 
do not equal one Caesar, they no doubt add more to the 
happiness of their own generation. 

We come back to this — that in body, in mind, in feeling, 
in character, women are by nature designed to play a different 
part from men. And all these differences combine to point 
to a part personal not general, domestic not public, working 
by direct contact not by remote suggestion, through the 
imagination more than through the reason, by the heart 
more than by the head. There is in women a like intelli- 
gence, activity, passion; like and co-ordinate, but not 
identical; equally valuable, but not equal by measure; and 
this all works best in the Home. That is to say, the sphere 
in which women act at their highest is the Family, and the 
side where they are strongest is Affection. The sphere 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 73 

where men act at their highest is in public, in industry, in the 
service of the State; and the side where men are at their 
strongest is Activity. Intelligence is common to both, capable 
in men of more sustained strain, apt in women for more 
delicate and mobile service. That is to say, the normal and 
natural work of women is by personal influence within the 
Home. 

All this is so obvious, it has been so completely the universal 
and instinctive practice of mankind since civilisation began, 
that to repeat it would be wearisome if the modern spirit 
of social anarchy were not now eager to throw it all aside. 
And we have only to repeat the old saws on the matter, 
together with this — that such a part is the noblest which 
civilisation can confer, and was never more urgently needed 
than it is to-day. In accepting it graciously and in filling it 
worthily, women are placing themselves as a true spiritual 
force in the vanguard of human evolution, and are perform- 
ing the holiest and most beautiful of all the duties which 
Humanity has reserved for her best-beloved children. The 
source of the outcry we hear for the Emancipation of Women 
— their emancipation from their noblest duty — is that in 
this materialist age men are prone to despise what is pure, 
lofty, and tender, and to exalt what is coarse, vulgar, and 
vainglorious. 

When we say that we would see the typical work of woman 
centred in her personal influence in the Home, we are not 
asking for arbitrary and rigid limitations. We are not 
calling out for any new legislation or urging public opinion 
to close any womanly employment for women. There are 
a thousand ways in which the activity of women may be of 
peculiar value to the community, and many of these neces- 
sarily carry women outside their own houses and into more 
or less public institutions. The practice of the ladies con- 



74 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

nected with our Church alone would satisfy us how great is 
the part which women have to play in teaching, in directing 
moral and social institutions, in organising the higher standard 
of opinion, in inspiring enthusiasm in young and old. We 
are heartily with such invaluable work; and we find that 
modern civilisation offers to women as many careers as it 
offers to men. 

All that we ask is that such work and such careers shall 
be founded on womanly ideals, and shall recognise the essen- 
tial difference in the social functions of men and of women. 
We know that in a disorganised condition of society there 
are terrible accumulations of exceptional and distressing 
personal hardship. Of course millions of women have, and 
can have, no husbands; hundreds of thousands have no 
parents, no brother, no true family. No one pretends that 
society is without abundant room for unmarried women, 
and has not a mass of work for women who by circumstances 
have been deprived of their natural family and are without 
any normal home. Many of such women we know to be 
amongst the noblest of their sex, the very salt of the earth. 
But their activity still retains its home-like beauty, and is still 
womanly and not mannish. All that we ask is that women, 
whether married or unmarried, whether with families of 
their own or not, shall never cease to feel like women, to 
work as women should, to make us all feel that they are true 
women amongst us and not imitation men. 

We are not now discussing any practical remedy for a 
temporary difficulty; we are only seeking to assert a para- 
mount law of human nature. We are defending the prin- 
ciple of the womanliness of woman against the anarchic 
assertors of the manliness of woman. There is a passionate 
party of so-called reformers, both men and women, who are 
crying out for absolute assimilation as a principle; and 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 75 

such is the weakness of politicians and leaders that this 
coarse and ignorant sophism is becoming a sort of badge 
of Radical energy and freedom from prejudice. With all 
practical remedies for admitted social diseases we are ever 
ready to sympathise. In the name of mercy let us all do 
our best with the practical dilemmas which society throws 
up. But let us not attempt to cure them by pulling society 
down from its foundations and uprooting the very first ideas 
of social order. Exceptions and painful cases we have by 
the thousand. Let us struggle to help or to mend them, as 
exceptions, and not commit the folly of asserting that the 
exception is the rule. 

We all know that there are more women in these kingdoms 
than men, and not a little perplexity arises therefrom. But 
since more males are born than females, the inequality is 
the result of abnormal causes — the emigration, wandering 
habits, dangerous trades, over-work, and intemperance of 
men. There are other countries, especially across the Ocean, 
where the men greatly outnumber the women. It is the first 
and most urgent duty of society to remedy this social disease, 
and not to turn society upside down in order to palliate a 
temporary and a local want. Certainly not, when the so- 
called remedy can only increase the disease by "debasing 
the moral currency" and desecrating the noblest duties of 
woman. Certainly, no reformers whatever can be more 
eager than we are to do our best to help in any reasonable 
remedy for our social maladies, be they what they may. 
But the extent and acuteness of social maladies makes us 
only more anxious to defend the first principles of human 
society — and to us none is so sacred as the inherent and 
inalienable womanliness of all women's work. 

The prevalent sophistry calls out for complete freedom to 
every individual, male or female, and the abolition of all 



76 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

restraints, legal, conventional, or customary, which prevent 
any adult from living his or her own life at his and her private 
will. It is specious; but, except in an age of Nihilism, such 
anarchic cries would never be heard. It involves the de- 
struction of every social institution together. The Family, 
the State, the Church, the Nation, Industry, social organisa- 
tion, law, all rest on fixed rules, which are the standing 
contradiction of this claim of universal personal liberty from 
restraint. Society implies the control of absolute individual 
licence; and this is a claim for absolute individual licence. 
It is perfectly easy to find objections and personal hardship 
in every example of social institution. 

Begin with marriage. Many married people would be 
happier and, perhaps, more useful, if they could separate 
at will. Therefore (the cry is) let all men and women be 
always free to live together or apart, when they choose, and 
as long as they choose, without priests, registrars, law-courts, 
or scandal. Many parents are unworthy to bring up their 
children. Therefore, let no parent have any control over his 
child. Many women would be more at ease and perhaps 
more able to work in their own way, if they wore men's 
clothes. And some men, among the old and the delicate, 
might be more comfortable in skirts. Therefore, abolish 
the foolish restrictions about Male and Female dress. And 
this our reformers, it seems, are preparing to do. Many 
men and more women are, at twenty, better fitted to "come 
of age" than some men at thirty. Therefore, let every one 
"come of age" when he or she thinks fit. Many a man 
who, through hunger, steals a turnip is an angel of light 
compared with a millionaire who speculates. Therefore, 
abolish all laws against stealing. Many a foreigner living in 
England knows far more of politics than most native electors. 
Therefore, abolish all restrictions applying to "aliens" as such. 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 77 

Many a layman can preach a better sermon than most 
priests, can cure disease better than some doctors, can argue 
a case better than certain barristers, could keep deposits 
better than some bankers, find a thief quicker than most 
policemen, and drive a "hansom" better than some cabmen. 
Therefore — it is argued — let every man, woman, and child 
live with whomsoever he or she like, wear breeches or petti- 
coats as he or she prefer, put their vote in a ballot-box when- 
ever they see one at hand, conduct divine service, treat the 
sick, plead causes, coin money, carry letters, drive cabs, and 
arrest their neighbours, as they like, and as long as they like, 
and so far as they can get others to consent. And thus we 
shall yet rid of all personal hardships, all restrictions as to 
age, sex, and competence, and all public registration; we 
shall abolish monopolies, male tyranny, and social oppression 
generally. 

The claim for the complete "emancipation" of women 
stands or falls along with these other examples of emancipa- 
tion. And the answer to it is the same. The restriction, 
which in a few cases is needless, hard, even unjust, is of 
infinite social usefulness in the vast majority of cases, and 
"to free" the few would be to inflict permanent injury on the 
mass. To make marriage a mere arrangement of two per- 
sons at will would be to introduce a subtle source of misery 
into every home. To leave women free to go about in men's 
clothes and men free to adopt women's clothes, would be to 
introduce unimaginable coarseness, vice, and brutalisation. 
To leave every one free to fill any public office, with or without 
public guarantee or professional training, would open the 
door to continual fraud, imposture, disputes, uncertainty, and 
confusion. It is to prevent all these evils that monopolies, 
laws, conventions, registers, and other restrictions on per- 
sonal licence exist. And the first and most fundamental of 



78 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

all these restrictions are those which distinguish the life of 
women from that of men. 

Not very many reformers consciously intend the "emanci- 
pation" of women to go as far as this. There is a great deal 
of playing with the question, more or less honest, more or 
less serious, as there is much playing with Socialism, Agnos- 
ticism, and so forth, by people who perhaps, in their hearts, 
merely wish to see women more active and better taught, or 
some of the worst hardships of workmen redressed, or the 
dogmas of Orthodoxy somewhat relaxed. But when a great 
social institution is seriously threatened we must deal with 
the real revolutionists who have a consistent aim and mean 
what they say. And the real revolutionists aim at the total 
"emancipation" of women, and by this they mean that law, 
custom, convention, and public opinion shall leave every 
adult woman free to do whatever any adult man is free to 
do, and without let or reproach, to live in any way, adopt 
any habit, follow any pursuit, and undertake any duty, 
public or private, which is open to or reserved to men. 

Now I deliberately say that this result would be the most 
disastrous to human civilisation of any which could afflict 
it — worse than to return to slavery and Polytheism. If only 
a small minority of women availed themselves of their "free- 
dom," the beauty of womanliness would be darkened in every 
home. Just as if but a few married people accepted the 
legalised liberty of parting by consent, every husband and 
every wife would feel their married life sensibly precarious 
and unsettled. There is nothing that I know of but law 
and convention to hinder a fair percentage of women from 
becoming active members of Parliament and useful ministers 
of the Crown, learned professors of Hebrew and anatomy, 
very fair priests, advocates, surgeons, nay, tailors, joiners, 
cab-drivers, or soldiers, if they gave their minds to it. The 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 79 

shouting which takes place when a woman passes a good 
examination, makes a clever speech, manages well an insti- 
tution, climbs a mountain, or makes a perilous journey of 
discovery, always struck me as very foolish and most incon- 
sistent. I have so high an opinion of the brains and energy, 
the courage and resource of women, that I should be indeed 
surprised if a fair percentage of women could not achieve 
all in these lines which is expected of the average man. My 
estimate of women's powers is so real and so great that, if 
all occupations were entirely open to women, I believe that 
a great many women would distinguish themselves in all 
but the highest range, and that, in a corrupted state of public 
opinion, a very large number of women would waste their 
lives in struggling after distinction. 

Would waste their lives, I say. For they would be striv- 
ing, with pain and toil and the sacrifice of all true womanly 
joys, to obtain a lower prize for which they are not best 
fitted, in lieu of a loftier prize for which they are pre-eminently 
fit. A lower prize, although possibly one richer in money, 
in fame, or in power, but essentially a coarser and more ma- 
terial aim. And in an age like this there is too much reason 
to fear that ambition, and the thirst for gain and supremacy, 
would tempt into the unnatural competition many a fine and 
womanly nature. Our daughters continually desire to see 
their names in newspapers, to display the cheap glories of 
academic or professional honours, to contemplate their 
bankers' pass-books in private, and to advertise in public 
their athletic record. 

Let us teach them that this specious agitation must ulti- 
mately degrade them, sterilise them, unsex them. The glory 
of woman is to be tender, loving, pure, inspiring in her home ; 
it is to raise the moral tone of every household, to refine every 
man with whom, as wife, daughter, sister, or friend, she has 



8o REALITIES AND IDEALS 

intimate converse; to form the young, to stimulate society, 
to mitigate the harshness and cruehy and vulgarity of life 
everywhere. And it is no glory to woman to forsake all this 
and to read for honours with towelled head in a college study, 
to fight with her own brother for a good "practice," to spend 
the day in offices and the night in the "House," These 
things have to be done — and men have to do them ; it is 
their nature. But the other, the higher duties of love, beauty, 
patience, and compassion, can only be performed by women, 
and by women only so long as it is recognised to be their 
true and essential field. 

It is impossible to do both together. Women must choose 
to be either women or abortive men. They cannot be both 
women and men. When men and women are once started 
as competitors in the same fierce race, as rivals and oppo- 
nents, instead of companions and help-mates, with the same 
habits, the same ambitions, the same engrossing toil, and the 
same public lives, W^oman will have disappeared, society 
will consist of individuals distinguished physiologically, as 
are horses or dogs, into male and female specimens. Family 
will mean groups of men and women who live in common, and 
Home will mean the place where the group collects for shelter. 

The Family is the real social unit, and what society has to 
do is to promote the good of the Family. And in the Family 
woman is as completely supreme as is man in the State. 
And for all moral purposes the Family is more vital, more 
beautiful, more universal than the State. To keep the 
Family true, refined, affectionate, faithful, is a grander task 
than to govern the State; it is a task which needs the whole 
energies, the entire life of Woman. To mix up her sacred 
duty with the coarser occupations of politics and trade is to 
unfit her for it as completely as if a priest were to embark 
in the business of a money-lender. That such primary social 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 8 1 

truths were ever forgotten at all is one of the portents of this 
age of scepticism, mammon- worship, and false glory. Whilst 
the embers of the older Chivalry and Religion retained their 
warmth, no decent man, much less woman, could be found to 
throw ridicule on the chivalrous and saintly ideal of woman 
as man's guardian angel and queen of the home. But the 
ideals of Religion of old are grown faint and out of fashion, 
and the priest of to-day is too often willing to go with the times. 
Is it to be left to the Religion of Humanity to defend the 
primeval institutions of society? Let us then honour the 
old-world image of Woman as being relieved by man from 
the harder tasks of industry, from the defence and manage- 
ment of the State, in order that she may set herself to train 
up each generation to be worthier than the last, and may 
make each home in some sense a heaven of peace on earth. 



Ill 

THE REALM OF WOMAN 

An ideal of society would be imperfect if it failed to include 
the part of Women — at least one-half of the aggregate in- 
dustry of the world. 

There can be little doubt that women lead (if anything) 
even more busy lives than men, and enjoy less prolonged 
periods of leisure. 

The true ideal of women's work and life rests on three 
leading axioms : — 

1. That civilisation tends to differentiate and not to identify 
the lives of men and women. 

2. That the power of women is moral not material force. 

3. That the material work of the world must fall on men. 

I. Take the first axiom : — that civilisation tends to in- 
crease the true difference between men and women, and not 
to efface them. The whole question really lies there. A 
large and very noisy section of the community maintain 
precisely the contrary — that civilisation is every day making 
men and women more alike, and that we ought to do every- 
thing we can to accelerate and assist this beneficent law of 
society. 

There are some enthusiasts who go so far as to see a glorious 
future where men and women shall differ in nothing except in 
the fact that one sex will be rather physically stronger than 
the other, that marriage shall impose on the mother some 
temporary physical disqualifications from which the father is 
mysteriously exempt — but apart from a certain inferiority 

82 



THE REALM OF WOMAN 83 

in muscular strength, and occasional retirement from public 
life due to child-births (neither of which disabilities can 
perhaps be eliminated within any reasonable period of time), 
men and women are to be assimilated — in occupation, 
duties, rights, mode of life, habits, and even I presume dress. 

Civilisation no doubt tends to bring closer together many 
of the superficial, or subordinate differences between the sexes. 
It assimilates the education of men and women, it breaks 
down the barrier which keeps men and women in separate 
lives. In many things high civilisation does bring, not ab- 
solute equality between the sexes, but great correspondence. 
It co-ordinates and mutually adjusts the lives of men and 
women, bringing the influence of women to bear more and 
more into all phases of men's lives, destroying the last traces 
of the subjection of women, the slavery of women, the pre- 
sumed inferiority of women. 

Politics, science, philosophy, art, industry, social economy, 
become at last fields wherein the part of women is fully as 
important as the part of men. The hard and fast barriers 
of a ruder age are destroyed, and in all departments of human 
life the full emancipation of women is accomplished. So 
far from being blind or deaf to all these truths, we are the 
first to hail them as the very corner-stone of a high and true 
social life. 

With higher civilisation the essential differences of sex 
become ever more and more striking and efficient. 

It is a natural law, not only of human nature, but of all 
organic nature. The higher the development of the organism, 
the more highly specialised are its distinctive qualities: the 
more perfectly differenced is its peculiar function. The 
differences are far greater between man and man in a highly 
cultured society than they are in a savage society. The 
difference between Shakespeare and a ploughman (unless 



84 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

he is Robert Burns) is far greater than that between any 
two bushmen or Snake Indians. The differences between 
the civilised man and child are far greater than between the 
savage man and his child; the civilised man is enormously 
more the superior of the brute than the barbarian is. 

If civilisation is the real development of the organism in 
its natural and best way (and nothing else is, or can be, 
civilisation), civilisation necessarily develops the special 
function of every organism — just as a cultivated rose differs 
from a garden double dahlia infinitely more than the dog-rose 
differs from the wild dahlia. The same law acts, as man and 
woman are more highly cultivated. Their distinctive functions 
are more and more marked, even as their lines of develop- 
ment become more and more perfectly parallel and closer 
side by side. 

That is, of course, if the organisms do differ to begin with. 
And even this is perhaps disputed in an age of interminable 
paradox. We say frankly that man and woman do differ 
organically in profound and infinite ways. Man and woman 
are different organisms. Since all human and moral philos- 
ophy rests on a basis of biological and cosmological law, on 
the laws of organic life and physical conditions, the organic 
difference of man and woman is as real as it is complete. 
It is so much the fashion for a shallow sophistry to slide over 
plain truths of science, that it is necessary for us to fix our 
minds firmly on this. 

To begin with, the bodies of women are very much smaller, 
lighter, softer, weaker, than those of men — very much 
more sensitive to certain shocks and impulses — and far less 
capable of very prolonged strain. That is only the first 
difference. The next is that, independently of size and 
strength, the nervous organisation of woman differs from that 
of man (i) in being much more subtle; (2) in having a less 



THE REALM OF WOMAN 85 

stable equilibrium, i.e. in being more sensitive and easily 
affected; (3) and, principally, in being much less in volume, 
mass, force. No juggling can get rid of this — that if fifty 
men were set to fight fifty women anywhere, the women would 
be beaten; if fifty men and fifty women were exposed on a 
raft in the ocean without food or water, the men would sur- 
vive the longest; more of the women would die of nervous 
prostration. Finally, the female cerebrum, cerebellum, 
and nerve ganglia, in the average are greatly outweighed by 
the male. 

But this is only the beginning of the organic difference. 
The strictly sexual difference is truly profound, running into 
the whole of life, modifying radically the entire physical, 
intellectual, and moral constitution; causing constant inter- 
ruption to the physical and mental activity, mysteriously 
connected with the entire nervous organisation, and at epochs 
of gestation, birth, lactation, menstruation, and decline of 
life, more or less completely suspending the ordinary life and 
external activity. 

All this is, however, but the bare physiological difference. 
Yet how profound it is ; and it is the indispensable basis and 
nidus of all mental, moral, social life. But the mental, 
moral, and social differences growing out of these physical 
differences are far more important. It would be a miserable 
and narrow view indeed to regard the physical difference 
as the dominant, and all the rest but the accidental differences. 
It is a notion, at once crazy and brutal, that men and women 
differ as individuals differ, but not as sexes differ, or only 
as sexes differ in certain physical respects, as Laplanders 
differ from Patagonians, or Englishmen from Hottentots; 
the one sex smaller, less strong than the other, each having 
one peculiar physical function. 

II. Mankind, it is often forgotten, cannot be divided 



86 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

into men and women, and never, as a fact, live as individuals. 
An individual is really a logical conception, a subjective 
generalisation. Individuals can be thought of; but individ- 
uals do not live. Nervous systems can be conceived in 
thought ; they do not exist in reality, detached living entities. 
Men and women do not exhaust more than half of mankind. 
There are quite as many children ; and children are not men 
and women. 

Then again, men and women cannot live apart, either from 
each other, or from the children. Humanity would come to 
an end if they tried. We cannot count off so many million 
women, so many million men as similar units, as we might 
so many million trees in a forest, or so many soldiers in an 
army. Humanity would not exist if it only consisted of so 
many individuals. An army would not exist if it consisted 
of so many millions of legs and so many millions of arms, 
trunks, and heads, and so forth. Unless the arms, legs, 
trunks, and heads were organically compounded in living 
human bodies there would be no army, even if it had the 
requisite number of legs and arms. 

There can be no Humanity unless it be made up of so 
many persons organically united in families. Humanity con- 
sists of families, not of individuals. Individuals are only an 
artifice of logic, for statistical purposes or the like. All real 
life, for the great bulk of mankind, implies the distribution 
of mankind in families. 

If we keep this steadily in view we shall go right. It is 
only when we persist in the metaphysical habit of thinking 
of society as made up of individuals that these aberrations 
and confusions arise. If men and women lived in the world 
as separate units like trees in a wood, very different results 
would follow. But, as a fact, they do not, and cannot, so 
live. They live in groups, in families, in households; some 



THE REALM OE WOMAN 87 

no doubt temporarily detached from their families, but all 
naturally and necessarily beginning life in families, and 
always actually or potentially forming part of a household 
large or small, at least for a great part of their lives. 

And since mankind do and must live in families, and since 
all high civilisation immensely develops the organisation 
of family life, and makes each family more and more a 
distinct organ in society, a whole series of considerations arise 
as to the management, preservation, protection, education 
of the family; as to the respective duties of father, mother, 
son, daughter, husband, wife, sister, brother; as to the 
special function in the family of each member of it ; as to 
the relative functions of young and old, strong and weak, 
equals and superior, male and female. 

All this, acting and reacting, on the one side on the in- 
eradicable differences of sexual organisation, on the other 
on the institutions, duties, laws, and customs of society, 
combines to create that inexhaustible mass of differences 
in mental aptitude, in emotional character, in sympathy, in 
tenderness, in faculty for arts, in affection, in power, in 
courage, in patience, in magnanimity, in industry, in a thou- 
sand qualities of heart, brain, and will, which we see in the 
highest types of modern civilisation as distinguishing the 
function of women from that of men. 

It is the lowest type of savage life where we find the squaw 
and the brave hardly differing except that the squaw is less 
fit for war, and is the drudge of the warrior — if there be not 
a still lower type where men and women are imagined as 
much alike as mares are to horses. The highest type of 
civilised life at the other end of the scale, introduces us to all 
those subtle differences of nature, and those finely graduated 
functions which we find in modem life. If men and women 
were simply so many free, equal, independent John Smiths 



88 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

and Mary Smiths, but otherwise on terms as equal, similar, 
and independent as the men and women passing in the streets 
each their own way, there might be ground for the ultiniate 
assimilation of men and women. 

But the streets give us only an accidental and temporary 
view of life. Men and women come there for a special 
object, for a brief hour. Follow these commonplace, hard- 
working men and women to their homes — they all have 
homes — and then we find their real life, their permanent, 
constant life ; the children, the wife, the husband, the mother, 
the father, the brother, the sister, the companion, the friend, 
the servant, it may be. There is the supper to be got ready, 
the things to be cleared, the children to be put to bed, the 
father to be talked with, the morrow's work to be got ready, 
the week's spending-money to be counted up, the thousand 
tasks, cares, thoughts, which make up the real life of us all, 
— all the duties of affection, patience, courage, ingenuity, 
and energy, which constitute man's highest nature. 

Now here we have a field, where human nature, from the 
dawn of social life, has found an inexhaustible body of different 
but appropriate functions. It is found, as a fact, that the 
mother can care for the baby better than the father; that 
the father can stand the rough work in the field better than 
the mother; that the family will simply expire unless, in 
the seasons of weakness for the child-bearing mother, and the 
young for many years, the husband and father fight, toil, 
build, defend, construct for all. It is found that in sickness 
no care of the man's equals the woman's; that no tender- 
ness of the man's approaches hers, no patience, purity, con- 
stancy, mercy, or long-suffering. It is found, as a fact, that 
the parts are best filled by young and old, male and female, 
strong and weak, courageous and loving, each bearing differ- 
ent functions. 



THE REALM OF WOMAN 89 

III. From this germ, coeval with the cave-bear, have 
grown all the subtle and infinite gradations and nuances in 
the characters and minds of men and women ; in the highest 
types of civilisation they reach up to those profound moral 
and mental differences which give such charm, strength, and 
reality to our social existence, and which have been idealised 
for us by the poets of every age. They who talk of the assimi- 
lation of men and women, the effacing the petty differences of 
sex, might as well tell us that Othello might have been a 
woman, and Desdemona a man; that Ophelia and Hamlet 
were as like as two peas ; that Tom Jones and Sophia differed 
only in having male and female bodies ; that it was a mere 
accident that Jeanne d'Arc was not a boy, and Julius Caesar 
or Oliver Cromwell girls. Poetry, philosophy, history, 
morals, physiology, common sense — all teach us, that close 
as they are, like as they are, and more and more destined to 
co-operate in one life, men differ from women in all sorts of 
ways — in moral and emotional power, in qualities of heart, 
brain, and will, in aptitudes, temper, resources, and tendencies; 
that the bare physiological distinction of sex is quite the least 
difference, though it is the essential basis of other differences. 
And finally, those moral, micntal, and ethical differences, 
though ever brought closer into harmony and co-ordination, 
are perpetually being accentuated anew by the progress of 
civilisation. 

We need lay down no absolute law as to the respective 
powers of men or women. It is quite conceivable that if 
the male sex had been formed by nature (as in some animals) 
the weaker, the smaller, the more exposed to periodical 
prostration, if men had the feminine qualities more pro- 
nounced than women, had a genius for cherishing a child, 
and for inspiring love and subduing passion, and if children 
were picked alive and hearty off a gooseberry bush, and looked 



90 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

after their own nurture and education like young tadpoles, 
it is perfectly possible that relatively women might have been 
the stronger, more active, courageous, the harder and coarser 
part of the human race. They would realise the ideal of 
our enthusiasts for the masculinity of women. 

But all this is a mere fairy tale, wildly unlike the real 
facts of the actual world. Civilised society exists; it is the 
complex issue of hundreds of centuries of human institutions. 
The parts have been cast for millions of years in this great 
drama of the world. Men and women live not in units but 
in pairs : — rather in groups, in families, in a thousand fixed 
institutions which it is too late now to destroy and resist. 
Men and women, since the days of fig leaves, have worn a 
different dress : — have different personal habits, wants, 
faculties; have functions, different though corresponding, 
in the home, and out of it, in industry, in social intercourse, 
in war, in politics, in teaching, in worship. 

Such as these different functions, institutions, and habits 
are in the common acceptance of civilised Europe, we must 
accept them in the main. Far from believing them perfect, 
and not falling short in being capable of great development 
and purification, in the main we must accept the idea of 
common sense, that the parts of men and women in life should 
be so far different as is required by their differences of struc- 
ture, and moral and mental habit. 

Those who would recast these respective parts, and equalise 
the practical functions of the two, forget that this is no simple 
question to be settled by itself, whether this or that woman be 
not as able to argue a cause or make a speech as this or that 
man ; but rather since the institutions of society, family, educa- 
tion, manners, laws, and morality, all hang together and stand 
or fall together, the real question is, whether the ancient pil- 
lars of social union shall be shaken out of their sockets. 



THE REALM OF WOMAN 9 1 

The ancient judgment of civilised mankind is simply that 
men are fitter for the laborious, rougher, dangerous, ex- 
hausting, and outdoor forms of industry; women fitter for 
the more delicate, subtle, artistic, domestic forms of industry ; 
that men have more energy, courage, coolness, and stability ; 
women more affection, tenderness, mercy, and self-devotion; 
that the intellect of men is more capable of prolonged and 
intense abstraction, is a drier light, as Bacon says, and can 
be kept longer in extreme tension at a steadier glow; that 
the intellect of women is more alert, in quicker correspondence 
with the external world and the internal world of emotion, is 
altogether more delicate, more subtle, rapid, and versatile. 
All this is the A B C of human nature, embodied in a thousand 
institutions, customs, and maxims, idealised in a thousand 
types of art from Pheidias and Sophocles to Raphael and 
Shakespeare, Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, and George Eliot. 

Who now wishes to propound the idle, silly question — 
which of the two is the superior type? For our parts, we 
refuse to answer a question so utterly unmeaning. Is the 
brain superior to the heart, is a great poet superior to a great 
philosopher, is air superior to water,, or any other childish 
conundrum of the kind? Affection is a stronger force in 
women's nature than in men's. Productive energy is a 
stronger force in men's nature than in women's. The one 
sex tends rather to compel, the other to influence; the one 
acts more directly, the other more indirectly; the mind of 
the one works in a more massive way, of the other in a more 
subtle and electric way. But to us it is the height of unreason 
and of presumption to say anything whatever as to superiority 
on one side or on the other. All that we can say is, that where 
we need especially purity, unselfishness, versatility, and refine- 
ment, we look to women chiefly ; where we need force, endur- 
ance, equanimity, and justice chiefly, we look to men. 



92 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Out of this dualism, or double part of the two sexes in 
human life, a dualism that results in part from the organi- 
sation of the sexes, and in part is the accumulated effect 
of infinite ages of habit and social institutions — there has 
grown up a complex distribution of parts in life, some natural, 
we say, to women, some natural to men. And the future of 
civilisation will enforce and increase this distribution of parts, 
instead of effacing it, inasmuch as it tends to develop the 
higher nature of men as well as of women. In this age, 
when all possible opinions about human nature are thought 
equally plausible, and when all synthetic habits of treating 
human nature as a whole are lost in the habit of special 
analysis, in solvent criticism of detached details, it is argued 
that every distribution of parts should be a perfectly open 
question, always to be decided for each individual case by 
the private judgment of each individual. 

This is all very well, where the point to be decided is a simple 
question of personal aptitude, as if a man shall go into the 
army or to trade, or if a woman shall marry or remain single. 
It is not a simple, not a personal matter at all. People are 
born male or female, they have fathers and mothers, brothers 
and sisters, wholly apart from their personal choice; and, 
when they pair, they have sons and daughters, grandsons 
and granddaughters, and a multitude of family and social 
relations grow up round these facts, practically irrespective 
of their control or choice. 

The moral and social value of institutions depends on their 
being institutions — creations and forces of society, beyond 
personal caprice, and independent of individual fitness in the 
particular case. Institutions would become centres of social 
contagion, if in each individual case the personal qualities 
and suitability of individuals had to be separately judged, 
and judged by the person himself. Marriage differs from 



THE REALM OF WOMAN 93 

all voluntary unions chiefly because it is a union which has 
passed out of the voluntary purpose of the parties: into 
one which society for its own sake has taken into its own 
hands and on which it imposes its own moral and legal duties. 
If in marriage, husband and wife were free at all times to 
decide that their union were no longer suitable, to abandon 
their children, and to resume their single liberty, marriage 
would cease to be a social institution and would become 
a bestial cohabitation. 

The relation of parent and child produces certain moral, 
legal, and social rights and duties respectively, which society 
and law enforce without any reference to individual fitness 
or personal choice. The family would cease to exist, if it 
were always an open question whether the parent should 
feed, educate, or control the child, and the child should obey, 
love, and respect its parent. The family would come to an 
end if it were an open question if the brothers could marry 
the sisters, and whether the sons could chastise their mothers. 
It is quite possible that in extreme cases there are families 
where it would be better for the parents to obey the children, 
and where the children ought to control their parents, possibly 
where, both on physical and moral grounds, it would be 
perfectly wise that brother should marry sister, as Egyptian 
and Asiatic princes did. 

These horrible and extreme possibilities may show that 
social institutions would break up or turn into poison unless 
they did override individual exceptions and personal qualities. 
The moral use of them to mankind is that they are an ex- 
ternal social control imposed on personal licence. Society 
would come to an end if its institutions were always dependent 
on the personal equation of the individual. There are some 
men who no doubt are more fit to live the lives of women 
than of men, who would be healthier and happier — nay, 



94 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

more useful personally, if they adopted women's gowns, 
took charge of a nursery, spent their time in sewing rather 
than bricklaying. There are some women who would be 
healthier, happier, and certainly more useful, if they discarded 
petticoats, and became soldiers, sailors, cab-drivers, and 
policemen. But the world would be turned upside down if 
the external dress and distinct habits of the sexes were inter- 
changeable at the will of the person ; if young men in college 
discovered that the young fellows with whom they rowed, 
read, and supped, were girls; if the charming woman with 
whom we chatted agreeably at a party were really a soft 
young man of effeminate looks and tastes; if a man pre- 
sented himself to nurse and bring up our children; and if 
stout wenches in corduroys undertook to carry our boxes at 
a railway, or enlisted in the line to see some active service. 
Human society would be dissolved. Morality, decency, 
family, and social life would disappear. And all this is to 
be for the sake of some exceptional individuals, who pre- 
ferred to gratify their own tastes rather than submit to social 
control, essential to the welfare of society. The moral and 
the social value of institutions to mankind depends on their 
being external forces to modify and restrain selfish passions, 
wholly beyond the reach of arbitrary personal caprice, and 
even of individual fitness in particular cases. The family is 
the grand example of this. Its whole moral efficacy rests 
on this, that it is not an open matter, it is not a question of 
this or that one's fitness, his or her inclination. Husbands 
must provide for their wives, and protect and educate their 
children, worthy or unworthy. Wives must do their duty 
by husband or child, whether their duty is irksome or not, 
adequately repaid or not. All social institutions share this 
character. Their value consists in this — that they are 
external to the personal quality. 



THE REALM OF WOMAN 95 

It is a separate question what the specific function may be, 
and how far it is open to improvement. No social institution 
is perfectly unchangeable nor exempt from the law of progress. 
It is quite possible that the course of civilisation may gradually 
open certain functions to women that are hitherto reserved 
to men, and make interchangeable some parts which have 
been supposed finally cast. But all this must be treated with 
the proper conditions. It is too often treated nowadays 
as if it were a simple isolated question to be determined by 
a few striking exceptions. 

If a social function, hitherto reserved to men, is to be 
opened to women, let it be considered along with the whole 
scheme of social functions and the general meaning and 
necessity for social functions, and with the special reasons 
which take it out of the class of social functions peculiar to 
men, and whether or not the boon to exceptional individuals 
outweighs the general social disturbance. What we repudiate 
is the doctrine that every possible distinction that can be 
effaced between men and women is a gain, that these 
differences between men and women are a physiological 
phenomenon important to the individuals, but in which society 
has no concern, and that the whole case for effacing the 
specific reserve of any social function is proved when it shows 
that Mary, Maria, and Jane can do it as well, or nearly as 
well, as John, Thomas, and Harry. 

Some men, we know, learn to sew with their toes, and 
others to walk on their hands. But before we recommend 
the youth of the future to make their hands and theirl feet 
interchangeable organs, we had better consider the gej eral 
effect on the human organism of walking with the xieels 
swinging high in the air, or of holding the feet on a table at 
the level of the eye. 

The sum of the social institutions and observations whereby 



96 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the life of men and women is differentiated amounts to this, 
that from the vast preponderance of lovingness in the woman, 
from her delicacy of moral, intellectual, and physical nature, 
from all those gifts of taste, goodness, adaptability, quick- 
ness that we call womanliness, the great superiority of women 
lies in private life, in all that belongs to the home, to the 
care for the young, the suffering, the old, the afflicted — 
that is to say, that her work essentially belongs to the spiritual, 
the affective, the domestic, that the heart is her sceptre and 
the family her empire. And it equally follows from the great 
preponderance of man in strength, endurance, mass and 
bulk of physical, intellectual, and energetic power, from his 
superior steadiness of nerve in all things — in a battle, or a 
political crisis, or a criminal trial, or in his power of abstract 
tension, in the making of an epic poem or a railway, a system 
of philosophy or an operation for cancer — that man's sphere 
is essentially the material, that of public life, organised in- 
dustry, the field, the factory, and the government. 

Men and women, it is true, do not divide out the whole 
map of life into separate tracts : — women, as it were, taking 
one continent and men another — men taking politics, 
women the home; men taking education, women taking 
social intercourse; men taking industry, science, art; women 
taking morality, love, manners, charity. Nothing of the kind. 
Both men and women have to take the whole field of life, and 
cover the whole ground. The difference lies in this — 
that men and women have different ways of treating this 
field, and affect it by different qualities and forces. Men 
have to do with the home as well as women; men mostly 
finding the material part and being responsible for the main- 
tenance of that, and women playing a larger part in its purity, 
happiness, and sweetness. 

Women have to do with education quite as much as men; 



THE REALM OF WOMAN 97 

but the task of women is rather more with the education in 
the home, that of man more the education in the school. 
Women are at least as industrious as men, and their industry 
is quite as essential to human comfort ; but it has less to do 
with steam, the use of tools, and huge factories. Women 
have to do with politics, when they form political opinion, 
and set men a high ideal of social duty. So too they have 
to do with science, art, philosophy; though in each case in 
the more subtle and moral forms of these, where superior 
delicacy of perception is more necessary than intense power 
of prolonged abstraction. Everywhere and in all things 
Woman is the noblest work of civilisation, and her true work 
is to make a yet nobler civilisation by infusing into human 
life her supreme womanly qualities in her inimitable womanly 
way. 

Let us hold fast by this — that the great task before us is 
to make woman more womanly and man more manly, and 
the two main wants in this direction are to enlarge the op- 
portunities for woman to develop her inexhaustible wealth 
of affection, purity, and moral judgment ; on the side of the 
man to teach him the duty of taking on himself the mainte- 
nance of woman. The set of the sophistical Utopias which 
seduce some of the lettered classes is all the other way. It 
is to narrow in every way the opportunities of women to 
cultivate their affective nature, and to plunge them into the 
industrial mill, or into the intellectual arena of the day. Its 
aspiration is to make woman the rival of man, the com- 
petitor of man, in his trade and his public life; to make it 
impossible for him to take on him^self the task of exclusively 
maintaining woman. 

And all this is done in the name of the dignity, the freedom, 
the true elevation of woman ! Women are to be turned into 
second-rate men in public and industrial life, in order that 



98 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

they may abandon more completely any pretension to su- 
premacy in their own domestic, moral, and purifying life. 
And the equality of the sexes is to be the prize of this gigantic 
process of levelling down one sex to uniformity with the other. 
The true ideal of the dignity, the elevation, and real emanci- 
pation of women is far different. We would emancipate 
woman from systematic labour in the factory, in order to 
leave her free to cultivate her moral tenderness, and to ex- 
ercise her real spiritual ascendency. 

Is it possible that there is no field open to woman for the 
further exercise of all her great gifts, moral, social, intel- 
lectual; but that, in very want of employment, she must 
needs descend into the workshop or the professions to com- 
pete hand to hand with man ? It may be that in the corrupt, 
ill-trained, artificial, and unsocial stratum of the wealthier 
society, time hangs idle on a woman's hands. But we cannot 
reverse the institutions of the world for the pinings of a few 
misunderstood girls, or satisfy the selfish ambitions bred in 
the morbid air of a small artificial class. 

It is true that man (and indeed woman) has never done 
justice to the intellect of women, that, alone of the poets 
George Eliot has attempted to idealise it in art. It is true 
that the intellectual powers of women are far grander than 
poetry, philosophy, or psychology has yet imagined, im- 
mensely superior to the standard which conventional opinion 
presumes to set up. Humanity forbid that I should utter 
one word to countenance the brutal commonplaces as to the 
mental inferiority of women to men. To me the intellectual 
capacities of women seem a depth always of unfathomed 
reach. And for my part I humbly aver that I never talk 
half an hour with a cultivated woman without acknowledg- 
ing to myself how much my education has been neglected. 

And here in this intellectual power of women (under- 



THE REALM OF WOMAN 99 

valued hitherto, we admit) what a grand future is open ! 
For the first time in human history, we claim for women an 
education the same in all things as men's, and vastly in 
advance of any system of education actually open to men. 
The whole range of the sciences, the whole field of human 
history, the masterpieces of poetry of all ages and of all 
languages, the great truths of philosophy, morals, and 
religion — these are offered to women — nay, rather ! these 
will be held indispensable to women's education, to the 
education of all women, rich or poor. 

To women our ideal opens a new world, in assigning to 
them so great a task in education, in calling them to take 
their due part in science, in poetry, in art, in all forms of 
intellectual achievement. Positivism, as a religion, grew 
out of the profound admiration of the greatest of modern 
intellects for the moral and intellectual qualities of a woman 
of genius. It is saturated, as a system, with a recognition 
of women's intellectual powers, and with the mighty things 
that are yet in store for their achievement. No system of 
philosophy, religion, or morality ever approached the Posi- 
tivist system in the part it assigns in human civilisation to 
women's brain. And we are told that we Positivists under- 
value the intellect of women and would make of women 
dolls, or images of conventional worship. We treat such a 
charge with silent disdain. 

We, whose future demands of the intelligence of women 
tasks more high and severe than any which in our ordinary 
ways of life are expected from men, can smile when we hear 
that the true test of the mental calibre of the sex is to be 
found by their interest in the gossip of the lobbies, or the 
snippety criticisms of third-rate magazines. The intellect of 
the women whom we honour and trust, to whose moral and 
mental impulse we are proud to surrender our own intelli- 



lOO REALITIES AND IDEALS 

gence, needs not the hall-mark of the lobbies, the clubs, the 
journals, or the law-courts. We find it in our homes brighter, 
keener, and truer than any which we jostle and wrestle with 
in the crowds outside, be they male or female. Our true 
ideal of the emancipation of Woman is to enlarge in all things 
the spiritual, moral, affective influence of Woman; to with- 
draw her more and more from the exhaustion, the contamina- 
tion, the vulgarity of mill-work and professional work; to 
make her more and more the free, cherished mistress of the 
home, more and more the intellectual, moral, and spiritual 
genius of man's life. 

This ideal is not to be attained at once. It is not to be 
attained at all by mere forbidding, condemning, restricting. 
Here, as ever. Positivism exhorts. It does not prohibit. It 
does not set up to judge specific institutions, draw up amend- 
ments to Bills in Parliament, condemn persons and given acts. 
It sets up on high an ideal; it exhorts, stimulates, advises, 
and warns. It does not utter edicts or make crimes. It 
will look fairly on honest exceptions and real exemptions. 
For my part I could imagine, in this matter of the sexes, 
an exceptional woman, or an exceptional man, undertaking 
almost any unusual function, or doing almost any unusual 
thing, under real qualifying circumstances. I can conceive a 
woman leading an army like Joan of Arc, a female Lord 
Chancellor, a female Poet-Laureate, and a female Prime 
Minister — anything perhaps but exchanging clothes, to 
which I have a constitutional repugnance. But under 
qualifying conditions, of an extraordinary kind, in the cause 
of morality and society, and not in the cause of personal 
ambition, restlessness, and democracy. In the four thou- 
sand years of recorded history there have been one woman- 
poet — Sappho ; one heroine in arms — Joan of Arc ; one 
stateswoman — Queen Isabella of Castille. 



THE REALM OF WOMAN lOI 

We have all a home which we can labour to make more 
truly the free home of the women, and the comfort and 
purification of the men. We can all do something to make 
women's work more worthy of women, and less like that of 
men. We can all recognise that the true future of women 
is a spiritual and not a material development, and that in 
order to give women scope for that spiritual development, 
the material tasks of the world must fall mainly on man — 
that to force men and women like a herd of cattle into the 
same undistinguished tasks of material labour is to degrade 
both man and woman, intellectually, morally, and even 
materially. 



IV 



THE WORK OF WOMEN 

In the last Essay we laid down some general ideas, the 
whole effect of which was to show that the true aim of a 
higher civilisation would be to complete the co-operation of 
man with woman, and not to obtain the identity of man with 
woman. The question is not one of superiority or inferiority, 
but of harmony : — co-ordination of functions, not assimila- 
tion of function. Not equality in the crude sense, but real 
correspondence. 

In all this we are only holding by the accepted doctrine 
of the world. The philosophers, moralists, poets, and 
teachers have not been altogether wrong in their general 
estimate of women's great qualities, though they have not 
yet done justice to their intellectual powers. And as to func- 
tions of women and their work in the world, the common- 
sense view of modern Western civilisation is not utterly 
misguided. 

The whole burden of proof is really on those who seek to 
upset an immense body of social traditions and customs, sup- 
ported by an immense consensus of opinions, by the vast 
majority of men and women alike. Mr. Mill has argued his 
case, and the whole contention now goes on this basis, that 
social institutions cannot be fairly judged until we have had 
experimental proof of a society in which for a generation or 
two the old custom has been unknown ; and that there can 
be no harm in leaving any custom or institution a free and 
open question to be settled by personal choice in each case. 



THE WORK OF WOMEN I03 

A wilder and more anarchical plea cannot be imagined. 
Society is far too precious a result of civilisation, and of far 
too slow a growth, to be risked in fantastic experiments, 
which may destroy its life even before the experiment is 
complete. An enthusiast might as well urge us to try the 
experiment of a new patent brain or stomach warranted 
never, like the old ones, to wear out. We hear much about 
Vivisection in these days. But the worst and most anti- 
social kind of Vivisection is the claim of those who want to 
try experiments on the living body of society in order to see 
how it works, and how much society can bear without sink- 
ing. The very purpose of social customs is to protect 
society, not the particular individual subject to it, and its 
whole value consists in this, that it is above choice or any 
personal peculiarity. Mr. Mill and his followers argue this 
matter as if it only concerned the persons themselves in 
question. Such an idea cuts at the root of society as an 
organism. 

In spite of the regard and admiration I feel for Mr. Mill, 
I cannot accept his opinion on this matter as worth any- 
thing. A man who, as he was known to do, wished to see 
marriage itself modified to meet personal inclination, had 
really lost all sense of the true value of social institutions. 
To the anarchical, critical temper of modern discussion, it 
seems quite an obvious thing to say — Leave people free to 
decide on their own lives and to follow their own natural 
bent. We cannot do so without affecting all others in the 
same society, who have no kind of wish to try the experi- 
ment. In order that any custom may have any effect on 
conduct, may purify and steady men's lives, it must be a 
custom honoured in the observance, not in the breach, and 
if not observed universally, regarded at least as a matter of 
common duty. The continual breach of any custom, much 



I04 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

more the claim even of a few to a right to break it, under- 
mines and discredits it for all. 

Marriage is the great example of this. The successful 
assertion, even by a small minority, of a right to terminate 
the marriage at will without any social disapproval, would 
soon destroy in every marriage the sense of permanence and 
finality, which is the soul of marriage, and would undermine 
confidence and devotion between husband and wife. Every 
phase of the family would give us the same result. If some 
children asserted, without blame, their entire independence 
of parental control, all parents would find it impossible long 
to control their children. If parents were morally justifiable 
in neglecting their children, the maintenance of their off- 
spring would cease to be treated as a natural duty. If the 
sense of self-respect and respect for others, which we call 
the conduct of gentlemen, were displaced by the habits of 
slum-loafers, we should all have to be on our guard in public 
and in private against brutality and personal outrage. 

The world would be a different place if the habit of per- 
sonal politeness towards women, were given up, little as it is 
now enforced as it should be; and if women, or even a 
small group of women, insisted on absolute equality, and 
ridiculed the concession to them of any deference which 
they could not personally enforce for themselves. If, when 
a man opened the door of a railway carriage for a lady, he 
ran the risk of hearing her say: "Leave it alone, please; I 
can do it myself!" — he would lose the habit of opening it 
altogether. Every one can see how profoundly our sociaK 
existence is modified and exalted by the rule that it is dis- 
graceful under any circumstances for a man to hit a woman 
— a rule which goes deep down into the roughest and most 
immoral of the community, and but for which some streets 
would be a very pandemonium. 



THE WORK OF WOMEN I05 

If a set of emancipated and ambitious young women, pro- 
ceeding from gymnastics to fisticuffs and the art of self- 
defence, loudly repudiated the protection of this rule, and 
insisted on their personal right to hit, and to hit back, and 
showed themselves well able to back up a word with a blow 
— ruffianism would be rampant everywhere. The idea of 
disgrace in hitting a woman being destroyed, the great 
majority of men and women would sink into the relative 
position of big and little boys at school ; and personal bully- 
ing would become quite a natural thing in those ages and 
classes where fisticuffs are in common use. By asserting 
absolute equality, the respect for sex must be destroyed; and 
much brutality will be the result. Something of the kind 
takes place wherever social customs are defied. Every time 
a man or a woman asserts some liberty to defy custom, a 
social institution is snapped ; and all alike, men and women, 
feel their lives affected. 

All our social habits rest on a well-grounded confidence 
that our relations, friends, and companions will behave in a 
certain way, and our lives are moulded by this confidence. 
The most continuous influence over our conduct is that of 
our mothers, wives, sisters, daughters. It is a moral and a 
spiritual influence precisely because it does not rest on com- 
mand, business, experience, and wealth. Admit the entire 
equality and assimilation of the sexes, and our wives, mothers, 
sisters, and daughters are in the moral position of partners 
of a certain kind. The young expect from their mothers 
inexhaustible watchfulness and affectionate counsels; they 
are wont to look on their mother's opinion as higher than 
that of the world, and they know that they will always find 
her ear open to their sorrows, anxieties, hopes, and joys. A 
son finds the best of fathers a very different person from the 
best of mothers : his relations to his father and to his mother 



Io6 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

are of a wholly different kind, essential and beautiful as both 
sets of relations are. The sister is wholly different from the 
brother, as is the daughter from the son. Even less is the 
relative position of husband and wife interchangeable. 

Assume that the entire equality between the sexes is 
carried to the limit that some dream of. Social Utopias and 
reforms are best tested by being supposed to be universally 
adopted in their extreme form. Assume that the equalisa- 
tion of function is logically carried out — that employments, 
professions, habits are interchangeable at will between the 
sexes. Grant that our mothers, sisters, daughters are just 
as likely to be printers, tailors, merchants, lawyers, and 
doctors, clerks, accountants, public officials, as our fathers, 
brothers, or sons. What would be the result ? Our mothers 
would be as little at home as our fathers; they would come 
home as much fatigued, and as much in want of mere rest; 
they would be far too much absorbed in professional life to 
listen to the small troubles of their children, and too much 
women of business to give way to sentiment. The mill of 
hard work would make them so much alike that nothing 
but a difference of name and of dress would remain to re- 
mind us that the one were the women and the other the 
men of our household — though why the difference of name 
and dress should be retained, when the moral characteristics 
were gone, it is difficult to see. 

This is true not merely of our family life, but in all forms 
of our social intercourse. We are accustomed to treat 
women everywhere in public, in private, in society, in busi- 
ness relations, with a certain respect and deference, which, 
weak as it is, imperfect as it is, is the living symbol to men 
of the moral influence of women, to develop which is the 
most precious mission of civilisation. That pure and sacred 
acknowledgment by the stronger of the moral claims of the 



THE WORK OF WOMEN I07 

purer sex would disappear the day that men continually 
found women in desperate competition with them for ma- 
terial power, when they found women unsexed by exhaust- 
ing labour and professional anxieties, rejecting tenderness, 
persuasion, spiritual earnestness and superior unselfishness 
as their instrument of power, and claiming their power by 
force, practical success, and the cruel test of competition. 

How strangely some women deceive themselves in fancy- 
ing that they can win in the battle of life by their own strength, 
and yet not sacrifice the moral ascendency which centuries of 
civilisation have secured to them. Blind and petty ambition ! 
They cannot have it both ways. If only a certain propor- 
tion of women succeeded in claiming their right to fight it 
out with men on equal terms, to sacrifice family, and all 
the duties of family, to sacrifice all that is exclusively woman's 
privilege, in order to win by their own energy industrial and 
professional careers for themselves, the charm which it has 
cost Chivalry, Religion, and Modern Refinement a thousand 
years to build up, would be snapped at once; and men in 
the mass would come to regard women as mere female 
competitors. 

Can we doubt the result? Women, as physically the 
slighter, and less capable of prolonged strain, must be 
beaten. Their very qualities of heart and brain, their 
tenderness, unselfishness, and refinement of organisation 
would be a hindrance to them in the fight; the harder, 
stronger, less affectionate sex, free as men are from the 
handicap of periodic nervous prostration, would reassert 
their old brutal reign of force. The barbarism of earlier 
times would return; and the personal ambition of a few 
unwomanly women would have plunged their sex again into 
the horrible slavery of a subject and despised order. 

After all, civilisation has been in the main right in assign- 



Io8 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

ing to Women private, not public life, home industry, not 
professional industry, spiritual work, not material work. 
There is ample room for such work, for double the num- 
ber of women that exist. The possibilities of more woman- 
liness in the world are boundless. There is in every home 
an infinite capacity for moral and spiritual elevation, if only 
the women in it were free to develop their own nature with- 
out exhausting labour and cares. Where is the family which 
would not be the better for the women in it being wholly 
devoted to raise its whole standard of life and not to earn- 
ing their living? Where is the society of which it can be 
said that it has too much affection, tenderness, purity, and 
self-devotion ? The function of woman is not material pro- 
duction, but goodness, beauty, and truth. 

We sometimes hear in well-to-do homes that the women 
in it are dying of ennui, want of occupation, and objectless 
lives. Such homes are the creation of an artificial society. 
The immense mass of the people in city or in country would 
smile in derision to have the like imputed to them. Who 
ever heard of the working family in cottage or lodging where 
the women could find nothing to do ? In the great maze of 
our toiling millions the women, alas ! have too much to do, 
and the drudgery of household labour falls with terrible 
weight on the younger girls and on the nursing mother. But 
why does it so fall ? Because for the most part so many of 
the adult women are competing with their own fathers and 
brothers in the factory and the shop. In the rich and 
governing classes the social distractions of an artificial life 
leave the women no leisure for true and high careers. It 
may be that in classes, sufficiently rich to be freed from 
labour yet not rich enough to enter the arena of society, 
time may hang heavy on the hands of many women, who 
would think it a degradation to mix with their poorer neigh- 



THE WORK OF WOMEN 



109 



bours, and who have not enough education to fashion a 
cultivated life for themselves. But this is surely the preju- 
dice of an age which breeds the inhuman distinctions of 
class, and whose true education is still so deplorably short 
of our hopes and our ideals. 

And are these evils — cruel work wrung from the mother 
and the girl children, and a low and feeble education — 
both the obvious results of exacting labour — to be cured 
by increasing that labour, by withdrawing from the home 
even more adult women, and in forcing on all women, young 
and old, the grinding task of earning their daily bread ? It 
would seem like madness, this plan of curing social evils due 
to overwork in women by subjecting more women to this 
overwork. It is as if in a society avowedly suffering from 
poverty due to over-population, we were to seek to escape 
from that poverty by breeding more children to earn a small 
wage. The relief that the individual or each separate 
family may get by adding its women and children to the 
wage-earners is a direct increase of the distress to all other 
families by multiplying the supply of labour, and labour at 
lower rates. 

Nothing is a more certain economic fact than this: that 
women's labour is necessarily (in the rule of competition) 
cheaper labour than men's. And that for three reasons: 
the first, that women can maintain their strength on less 
food and cheaper food than men ; secondly, women, from 
their greater dependence on family life, cannot combine and 
enforce good wages so easily as men can; thirdly, that, 
whilst families hold together at all, women will look for at 
least a part of their maintenance to the men of their families. 
Accordingly, women's wages are hardly ever the strict market 
value of their labour. Women's wages are to a great extent 
extras, supplementary to their maintenance. They are pay- 



no REALITIES AND IDEALS 

ments in aid of their home support. And just as all wages 
are kept down by systematic poor-relief to the able-bodied, 
so women's wages are kept down by the almost universal 
practice of their being partly at least maintained by men, in 
their families or out of families. 

Either they actually are, or they expect to be, in part at 
least, maintained by men, as wives, daughters, sisters, or, it 
may be, companions. For let us not shirk this very horrible 
fact that, in all large cities and factories and workshops, 
where men and women are crowded together and the family 
life is crushed, a very serious proportion of the women, 
chiefly in the lowest and most miserable of all classes, but to 
some extent in the well-to-do, and even fashionable classes 
of industry, supplement their wages from time to time by 
the assistance of men, under conditions very different, more 
or less immoral, but all of them degrading, even where they 
fall short of open vice. I make no charge against any class, 
least of all do I impute this evil to women more than the 
men, but it would be idle to shrink from the knowledge that 
the degree in which immoral means of living are open to 
working women seriously affects even their wages. 

Add to this immoral support, the wholesome and right 
maintenance of women by the men of their families, and we 
get a combination of causes, which, joined to their less 
physical and political energy, is certain to reduce the wages 
of women, if not below their true market value, below their 
true industrial equivalent. Hence we find that in great 
cities and the lowest types of industry, wages are perma- 
nently depressed below the level of subsistence in health; 
because a large proportion of the women employed in them 
eke out existence by other casual or irregular means; or, 
inasmuch as they may do so, they struggle on on the verge of 
starvation. 



THE WORK OF WOMEN III 

It may be said that this evil in its worst form may be 
remedied by improved morality and higher civilisation. But 
the increased supply of women's labour only tends to ad- 
journ a higher civilisation. And for the honour of human 
nature let us remember that the support which (over and 
above any earnings) women receive from men on immoral 
grounds is, after all, but partial and occasional, acting in 
exceptional and unfortunate industries only. The principal 
forms of such support are certainly not only moral but the 
most sacred of duties : — the support of the wife, the daugh- 
ter, the sister, by the husband, father, or brother. Need we 
discuss the suggestion which none but fanatics indeed could 
advance, that the true remedy will be to abolish all claims 
or habits of the kind ? Are we to be told that the wages of 
women will rise to their just economic level when every 
woman is felt to be as much bound to maintain herself as 
any man is now, and when women do not claim support 
from the men of their families, more than the men now 
claim it of the women? 

Happily for human nature this extravagant sophism is 
impossible to practise, at any rate so long as families exist. 
The bulk of men will still continue to maintain their own 
daughters as well as their wives, and to look on their main- 
tenance as a duty. And as the bulk of their daughters will 
soon be passing into the position of wives, and the minority 
alone of women have to look to wage-earning as their per- 
manent condition, it follows that under the rule of competi- 
tion, the wages of women will be always depressed. Nor is 
it only the rule of competition to which this applies. Whether 
under a wages-system, or competition, or the rule of equity, 
or even in socialism, the wages of women will be lower than 
those of men, inasmuch as in the bulk of industries their 
work is not economically so valuable as that of men. 



112 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Again comes in the law of inferior physical strength, 
greater liability to the influence of climate, exposure, and 
privation, and, above all, inferior degree of steadiness of 
physical equilibrium. No argument about rights can ever 
make women's labour in the majority of industries worth as 
much as men's in the simple economical valuation. And 
whilst that is the case, they cannot fairly expect so large a 
share of the profit. Every step then that we take towards 
increasing the proportion of women's work in the joint in- 
dustry of any society is a step towards decreasing the profit 
which the workers can obtain. 

It is certainly not in the way of positive vice alone that 
the evils are seen of the indiscriminate work of women and 
men. Where vice is happily prevented, and where the 
women themselves are innocent and blameless, they have to 
endure, in a crowded factory or shop, unless under circum- 
stances unusually fortunate, much that is coarse, contaminat- 
ing, and repulsive. I am very far from denying that there 
are shops and factories where the girls are as free from 
harm as in any home in the world. But they are rare. I 
speak with some more than ordinary means of knowledge. 
Friends of my own in our Body have told me of their re- 
pugnance to expose their daughters to such an ordeal. Speak- 
ing generally, I assert without fear of contradiction that the 
factories, crowded with men and women in indiscriminate 
work, where all idea of home retirement and of personal 
supervision is out of the question, almost necessarily expose 
the women to coarseness, which all but the very degraded 
succeed in excluding from their homes, and which is fraught 
with danger and pollution in any case. 

There are in Europe — in Russia, Italy, and Spain — 
districts, cities, and industries, where the limit of the equal 
employment of men and women is nearly reached in prac- 



THE WORK OF WOMEN II3 

tice ; where girls, young women, and mothers, as a rule, are 
employed as much as men. What do we see? Precisely 
what we have just described. The family has almost ceased 
to exist as a moral and civilising power. The home is a 
mere dormitory or common lodging-house, where the mother 
and the father are merely the oldest woman and oldest man, 
and where for that very reason they are the least considered. 
The women are merely hands who get smaller wages, get 
the worst of it in a struggle about wages, privileges, or profits, 
and who are physically thrust into the position of a weaker 
race. They are nearly as rough, as coarse, as unhandy as 
the men. They know quite as little of household comfort, 
of the children's health, of the grace and sweetness of a 
woman's life. The children are born ill-nourished, and they 
grow up without care, or they die of sheer mismanagement, 
because the women who bore them are rather their dams 
than their mothers — are not mothers in a moral and truly 
human sense. 

As to the influence of the woman on the men within her 
home, as to her exerting a high spiritual and moral power, 
as wife, daughter, or sister, the very materials for it do not 
exist. She has no claim, or title, or thought of such a force ; 
nor would he submit to it in any form. The males live in 
their homes beside the females, whom they find fellow- 
workers, only fit for lower wages, requiring less food, and 
easily coerced by force if necessary, but otherwise as com- 
pletely mates in work as any man in the whole shop. To 
this ideal are they tending who are striving to thrust more 
women into work. 

The immediate question of our day is not so much the 
withdrawing women from work, as it is the checking of the 
still further degradation of women by urging more of them 
into systematic industry of the factory kind, under the two- 



114 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

fold impulse of the desire of gaining an income, and mis- 
taken ideas of superior merit of women earning their own 
living. The first task of a rational system of life is to stem 
the increase of the evil. Let us begin by appealing to. men 
and women alike to withdraw at least the wives and mothers 
from the factory and the workshop. The evils of this, the 
physical, moral, economical evils of taking wives and mothers 
from their homes to plunge them in the mill, are so plain 
and manifold that we need hardly argue for the duty of 
resisting it. It would be something if our generation shall 
have established this, that the place of the wife and the 
mother is in her home; that the first duty of the husband 
and the father is to maintain his wife and the mother of his 
children. 

As the vast majority of women must in time expect to be 
wives, as it is too ridiculous for argument to pretend that a 
wife is degraded by being supported by her husband, how 
forced and, artificial is the pretence that it belongs to the 
dignity of women to maintain themselves by their own 
exertions. A daughter, a sister, an aunt, a mother, or a 
widow, is no more humiliated by being supported by the 
men of her household than the wife who is supported by her 
husband, or the schoolmaster, or priest, or magistrate, who 
are all maintained by those for whom their lives are devoted. 
The women so supported are set free to other and nobler 
duties: to bring comfort, health, purity, and affection into 
the homes ; to teach, to brighten, to moralise the household ; 
to make the men feel how little their hard life of toil repre- 
sents the whole of man's existence, how infinitely nobler is a 
worthy home than the workshop or the market-place. 

Life would be a poor gift, civilisation would be a doubt- 
ful progress, if the whole human race were indefinitely 
condemned to incessant toil; if one day were to succeed 



THE WORK or WOMEN II5 

another, one year follow the last, bringing only the prospect of 
the same unbroken struggle for existence. Industry and 
effort is man's lot, and industry as a basis of our life is an 
indispensable necessity. But the whole of man's life is not 
mere industry ; the whole of mankind are not dedicated by 
nature to toil. Our moral, intellectual, artistic, emotional 
life have their claims. One half of mankind are not too 
many to dedicate to these. In any rational view of an 
organised and highly developed society, each separate func- 
tion needs a separate organ, each social duty is best performed 
by a special order, trained and habituated to it from youth. 

In the lowest types of society every kind of task falls in- 
discriminately on every member, on men and women, old 
and young alike. The rude implements and fabrics, the 
necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, are roughly and 
wastefully furnished by the ill-disciplined labour of any man 
or any woman in the tribe. The tribesmen fish, hunt, 
collect food, build huts, fight, dance, and chant their rude 
songs each in turn. Civilisation gives us men trained to do 
each of these as a separate profession. In time, society forms 
its fishermen, its builders, its manufacturers, its husband- 
men, its soldiers, its teachers, its artists, poets, thinkers, 
priests. It separates the home from the factory, the govern- 
ment from the public, labour from education, moral and 
spiritual duties from material and temporal duties. 

The same distinction of function applies in the highest 
civilisation to age and to sex. It is the business of the young 
to learn, of the old to advise, of the adult to work. It is the 
business of the Home to purify, to moralise, and to elevate ; 
of the School or the Church to teach and guide. And thus 
it is the business of adult men to supply all material produc- 
tion. It is the privilege of Women to infuse into life a moral 
and spiritual culture. 



Il6 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Our ideal then is that the whole organised labour, out- 
side the home, that is, the mass of factory work, should fall 
as a rule on the men ; that the activity of women as a rule 
should be exercised in the home. But this does not in any 
way imply that women are debarred from intellectual, 
social, professional, or political work, or that the work so 
done is in any way less in amount, or inferior in dignity. 
Nor does it imply that there is not an immense amount of 
industry pure and simple open to them in all those depart- 
ments which admit of household employment organised more 
or less in the type of a home. But with education, art, 
science, philosophy, the organisation of charity, or mutual 
help, the care of health on all its sides, the comfort of the 
desolate, the ignorant, and the friendless, in the refinement 
of life, and the improvement of social culture, in the forma- 
tion of opinion, in the moral and spiritual education of men 
— the work of women is absolutely boundless in extent. 

I feel very deeply that this is at most an ideal — an ideal 
impossible within any reasonable space for this generation 
or the next. I know very well that the great body of our 
fellow -citizens are no more able to withdraw the women of 
their families from work in the factory and support them at 
home than they are to devote themselves to a life of simple 
mental culture. And it would sound like an unfriendly 
mockery if I told them it was their duty to do what they are 
quite unable from necessity to accomplish. We would im- 
pose no formal obligations on persons, nor would we lay 
down absolute laws. We ask for no Act of Parliament, no 
positive prohibition of any kind. We appeal to opinion, to 
the slow operation of the collective conscience of the people. 
Fortunately the difficulty is one that is felt in the individual 
case, not in the aggregate. It is difficult for this or that 
household to surrender the earnings of the girls. But the 



THE WORK OF WOMEN II7 

general cessation of women's labour must inevitably increase 
the wages of men. The family would receive the same 
amount, though the men and the women of it would not be 
competing against one another, and mutually reducing each 
other's earnings. 

There is great talk now about the unemployed, gluts of 
the labour market, and such remedies as emigration, or 
drawing off the numbers of those who compete for work. 
There would be little anxiety on that score, if women were 
not competing with men in every labour market of Europe. 
All anxiety about over-population, lack of employment, and 
the superabundance of labourers, are the direct creation of 
our wild industrial anarchy, the competition for the cheapest 
labour, and the inevitable collapse of the old traditions of 
the Family. To seek relief in a glut of the labour-market 
and consequent low wages in actually increasing the numbers 
of the workers by thrusting more women into the places of 
men, is like curing dipsomania by more drink. 

Whatever is done will have to be done gradually and 
partially, and few of us but could do something at once to 
take some step in advance. Obviously the first and urgent 
duty is to withdraw from factory labour the mother and the 
wife. That I take even now to be moral obligation of the 
first order. The next step, I think, would be to withdraw the 
younger rather than the older unmarried women, as their 
independence is less and their future more undetermined. 
Then it is plain that work in a huge indiscriminate factory, 
with men and girls side by side, is far more unnatural and 
destructive of moral life than work in a smaller shop, organised 
more or less on a domestic type. Obviously too the hard 
and more masculine forms of labour, in the field, or the mine, 
the brickyard, and the forge, are far more injurious than the 
more delicate work of scissors, needle, or lace. As a rule, 



Il8 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the use of machinery driven by steam is a more unnatural 
form of work for women than a simple tool worked by hand, 
and as a general rule the fewer and the simpler the tools, the 
more congenial the work. 

Domestic service in a family, evil as are some of its inci- 
dents now, and shamefully as its high duties and obligations 
are misunderstood, is sound and right in itself. All that is 
needed is to inform it with a human spirit, and to bring 
dignity and goodness to bear on this much-perverted institu- 
tion. But in domestic service purified and regenerated by 
the spirit of humanity is a true and vast field for honourable 
women's work. Therein she does not, or at least should not, 
pass out of the family. She passes for a season into another 
family, or she would do so, if more worthy ideas of the domes- 
tic relation existed. With education in all its forms, with 
art, with the care of the young, the friendless, the sick, I can 
hardly see that women's occupation can ever be unwomanly, 
whatever form it may take, or however great a training, re- 
sponsibility, and labour it involve. 

Of the professions strictly so called, of the directing func- 
tions of wealth, or power, the same reasoning applies. As 
doctors, artists, poets, philosophers, leaders of political and 
social movements, there are doubtless occasional spheres 
for a few exceptional women. The immense value of such 
services no one can underrate. But the institutions of society 
can hardly be arranged to meet a few remarkable exceptions. 
It is highly desirable that poets and philosophers should 
exist; but we should think it highly inexpedient to 
bring up a young man as a poet or a philosopher and teach 
him to regard it as a professional career. Poeta nascitur 
non fit. And the woman of genius, as doctor, philosopher, 
artist, or leader, will make herself felt without our turning 
society upside down on the chance of producing her. 



THE WORK OF WOMEN II9 

The cry of our day is to make careers for women by effac- 
ing the allotment of functions to men and women by the cus- 
tom of society. The women of rare genius will make their 
own career without our help : the Sappho, Aspasia, Artemisia, 
Joan of Arc, the Madame de Stael, the George Eliot of her 
age, will always be found and recognised by their contempo- 
raries. For myself I deny that the average of women can 
ever make as capable heads of a great manufacture, or 
bank, or public office, or be as good lawyers, professors, 
statesmen as the average of men. I do not deny that they 
have adequate intellectual power, but they have not the same 
physical power — and morally, physically, and intellectually 
they have not the same lasting power and unvarying steadi- 
ness of nerve force that men have in business. Many women 
are quite equal to many men in the ordinary conduct of 
intricate business at ordinary times. But all women are 
liable to one fatal disqualification for high professional 
duties — i.e. moral and physical collapse under special 
strain — failure of nerve power, and of complete self-control 
at critical moments. And this defect, not important in the 
minor and less organised forms of work, becomes in the 
more difficult kinds of professional duty a danger so great 
that it may ruin a life of toil, and destroy the creation of years. 

But the true ground for the allotment of special careers 
to men and to women lies not, in truth, in this line. It is 
because women are imperatively needed in another career; 
because the efforts of all the women in the world are not 
enough to perform it adequately. The career of women is 
to dignify and elevate the life of man; nor is there any in- 
tellectual quality whatever, or any element of character, 
which may not find ample scope for its highest efforts in 
the task. There is no side of life which is not open to it, 
be it politics, art, science, society, manners, or religion. All 



I20 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

need the purifying influence of truly competent women. 
Is not this a career which may satisfy the ambition of any 
one man or woman? What is the meaning of careers being 
closed, when the whole range of human education, the whole 
field of philosophy, science, history, poetry, are open to all, 
be they men or women ? Are women as a rule so saturated 
and satiated with all the knowledge of mankind, is woman's 
education so complete and universal, that they must have 
fresh worlds to conquer? 

It seems to me that women should bless the leisure which 
has opened to those who have leisure such glorious oppor- 
tunities. It seems to me a nobler ambition to have reached 
a high standard of mental culture than to conduct a law-suit 
or manage a bank. I should think it a nobler ambition to 
infuse a loftier tone into the political opinion of one's own 
circle than to give a vote in a general election. For my 
part, I have taken some interest in politics for fifty years; 
but, so far as I can remember, I have very rarely given a 
vote. If I care neither to enter Parliament nor take part in 
government, nor even to vote in elections, it is because I 
hold that I do better if I address myself to the duty of mould- 
ing opinion whilst I keep out of parliaments, divisions, and 
polling-booths. I ask no woman to forfeit any claim to 
political power which I care to exercise for an hour, but I 
would that every woman in the kingdom cared as much for 
politics as I do myself. 

But it is not in the intellectual, political, or practical 
sphere that the true ambition of women should lie. Their 
real career is a moral one to ennoble and purify the entire 
life of mankind; and I have little sympathy with the ambi- 
tion which looks on this as a narrow and contemptible ofhce. 
Can we ever have too much sympathy, generosity, tenderness, 
and purity ? Can self-devotion, long-suffering, and affection 



THE WORK OF WOMEN 121 

ever be a drug in the market ? Can our homes ever be too 
cheerful, too refined, too sweet and affectionate? And is it 
degrading the sex of woman to dedicate her specially to this 
task ? If it be true, as ten thousand poets and the conscience 
of mankind have taught us, that these sacred qualities of 
humanity are found in their highest perfection in woman, 
is it not the problem of civilisation itself so to nurture our 
women that these qualities may best be developed? And 
can Paradox itself assert that these qualities and gifts of 
heart and character are best developed by effacing the attri- 
butes of men and women, by plunging women as a sex into 
that hard and pitiless struggle for wealth, place, or fame, 
which already has created for them the very evils of which 
we complain? 

If hardness be the curse of this age, are we to cure it by 
making women as hard as men ? If the race after wealth and 
success brutalises men, are we to open more brutalising careers 
to women ? If our home life has so little strength to correct 
the evils of our public life, are we to cure all by saying that 
home life shall not be reserved even for one sex or for any 
age? If it is neither in intellectual nor in practical energy 
that our age is deficient, but in unselfishness, in love, in 
gentleness, and grace, are we to cure the accumulated evils 
of an age of materialism by teaching women to rely on them- 
selves, to look to themselves, and to work for themselves, 
by telling them to put their families aside and turn their 
thoughts to earnings and prizes, to strip off the ancestral 
instincts of their sex, and to meet man shoulder to shoulder 
in the rough and tumble of competition. 

I do not hesitate to say that the Future of Humanity is 
bound up in this problem — whether women are to grow 
more truly womanly or more utterly unwomanly. If the 
latter, faith in Humanity has no raison d'etre, no meaning, 



122 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

no future. The ideal of Humanity is the development of 
woman's true nature, and the purification of man's nature 
thereby. The assimilation of woman's life to man's cuts 
off the last hope of establishing the Rule of Love over the 
Rule of Force, of ever securing for Humanity the future 
to which we look. 



V 



VOTES FOR WOMEN 

Great as is the revolution in the Constitution demanded 
to-day by some Women, it is but an incident in a social 
problem far vaster and more deep. Those who advocate 
Votes for Women are wont to treat it as a simple electoral 
reform, such as were the Ballot and the Lodger franchise. 
It is a very different thing. It cuts down to the roots of our 
family life — our social life. 

It is ominous to note the levity with which this chaotic 
change in political life is regarded, and the meanness with 
which weak public men yield to the clamour of small and 
noisy minorities. The tremendous experiment of entrust- 
ing political power to another sex has as yet been tried 
(I believe) only in Scandinavia, Australasia, and the rude 
Far West. The great Republics of France and America 
decline to risk their peace with any such anomalous fad. 

Extension of the franchise of any kind within the same 
sex concerns politics only: it does not disintegrate families; 
it may benefit or embarrass the State; it does not plant 
anarchy in the Home. No thoughtful man or woman denies 
that the cry of "Votes for Women" cannot be separated 
from the entire consensus of the domestic, social, and spirit- 
ual existence of Woman as a sex distinct from Man. Educa- 
tion, manners, social philosophy, religion, are all essentially 
involved in the change. It is no mere affair of Constitu- 
encies and House of Commons. It affects life on a thousand 
sides. 

123 



124 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

It is not easy to disengage one's mind from the prejudice 
cast on the cry by the senseless freaks of certain female 
larrikins of late. But even rowdyism of so silly and suicidal 
a kind cannot be altogether \ncglected in a survey of the 
situation, and that for at least two reasons. The able and 
distinguished women who have long urged this claim as a 
right have not succeeded in checking these follies, even if 
they have seriously tried to check them; and their critics 
say that they looked on, not with "sombre acquiescence," 
as a famous revolutionist is said to have looked on at massa- 
cres, but with rather an air of amused encouragement. In 
the result, the cause as a whole suffered from outrages which 
were as embarrassing to its supporters as they were black- 
guardly in form. 

A second point — and one of much more importance — 
is this. These vicious attacks upon friends, the indecency, 
the brutalities, the tricks, the lying, the unmanly and un- 
womanly devices of these displays, testify to a certain inher- 
ent unfitness of women to exercise political power. Nothing 
can justify girls who behave in public places like the street 
arabs of a fighting gang in the East End. Nor could any 
political object excuse women who, on system, resort to 
personal insolence, mendacity, and physical assaults on 
doorkeepers and policemen. This is no casual accident of 
a moment of irritation. What we have seen has gone on 
for years. It has been maintained by rich and strong asso- 
ciations. It has been organised by the known leaders of 
"Women's Rights." x\nd under it we have seen gangs of 
hired girls behaving in public places, and towards the agents 
of public order, with the savagery of low viragoes. And 
many of the Women partisans think these orgies likely to 
be useful to the Cause. 

What such extravagances prove is this — that under strong 



VOTES FOR WOMEN 1 25 

political inducements women, as a sex, lose their heads, 
their power of judgment, and their self-control. The 
immedi'-ite aim blinds them to all countervailing reasons, 
to all fairness, and consideration for other claims. As some 
criminals are said to "see red," and go for their enemy, 
some women, when stung with a political idea, however little 
urgent, practical, or immediate it may be, "see red," and 
go blindly for that one aim by any means and in spite of any 
objection offered by friend or foe. They fling aside mod- 
esty, the habits of their sex, regard for justice, and common 
honesty. As to truth, honour, decency, men's respect for 
women — these weigh nothing against the "Cry." Now 
philosophy and experience tell us that Women, as a sex, 
more or less share this radical infirmity for coolly judging 
conflicting interests and competing claims. 

There is every reason to fear that those fits of blind passion 
will become systematic. If these viragoes ever did worry 
men into yielding the suffrage, they would only be heartened 
to resort to the same tricks to win admission to Parliament. 
This won, they would yell and ring bells till men yielded 
them an equal number of seats in the Cabinet. As every 
question came up for debate, a noisy group of women would 
rave and intrigue to get their favourite Bill taken first, or 
passed at any cost. It is the incurable incapacity of the 
average female mind to strike a fair and quiet balance 
of advantages and dangers, of which the recent movement 
has given us signal examples. Men have now seen women 
in political action. And they will not trust them. The 
actual constituencies of men are too often fickle, excitable, 
and unreasoning. If men were doubled with women, con- 
stituencies would seldom be anything else than fickle, excit- 
able, and unreasoning. 

I am well aware that in urging this, and in using plain 



126 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

language to express the disgust that sensible men and women 
feel for female rowdyism, I am exposing myself to the ven- 
geance of ill-conditioned fanatics. I speak plain words, be- 
cause I see with shame how men and women shrink from 
uttering what they feel in their hearts. It is, I know, part 
of the mean game in favour, to try what can be done by 
insolence, mendacity, and petty terrorism. Nor would it 
surprise me if some of the hotter spirits proceeded to criminal 
outrages, as anarchist women have done in Russia and Poland. 

I am also well aware that the temper of misrepresentation 
will seek to treat my criticism of rowdyism as insulting to 
women as a sex, and my pointing the moral of this rowdyism 
to prove a general weakness in women for political discern- 
ment, as if it were a depreciation of woman's intellect and 
character. Nothing could be more untrwe. All that I have 
said in preceding Essays of the fine intelligence and high 
qualities of women as a sex, is perfectly consistent with my 
rooted objection to giving to women the parliamentary fran- 
chise. Nor does this principle tend to rule women out of 
politics, or gainsay the truth, that women have a great and 
indispensable part to play in political life — the supreme 
part, in fact, and a part which women alone can fill. 

There is neither inconsistency nor paradox in this view. 
It turns upon the fundamental and indelible distinction 
between Material and Moral power — between practical 
Control and spiritual Influence — between Force and Per- 
suasion. To develop this innate social contrast, this ineradi- 
cable dualism in life, is a prime task of civilisation. This is 
not a mere contrast or dualism of sex, though the question 
of sex both illustrates it and shares in it. It marks off every 
kind of teaching, persuading, or inspiring, from every kind 
of command, judgment, punishment, or combat. All who 
teach or preach, who do the thought and art of the world 



VOTES FOR WOMEN 127 

pro tanto form a moral power. All who make laws, judge 
civil and criminal causes, who govern the State, form and 
lead armies in war, exert pro tanto a material power. Women, 
as a sex, are pre-eminently fit to exert this moral power. 
Men are not only far more fit to exert material power — but 
for a very large part of it, men form the one sex which is 
able to exert it efficiently at all. 

There are of course exceptions; and there are no rigid 
divisions either as to sex, or office, or competence. Some 
women could fight in war, some women have fought. Ex- 
ceptional women have passed their lives as soldiers, sailors, 
brickmakers, and jailers; and a very few have proved 
capable rulers. But it would be ridiculous to levy armies 
of women, to enrol women to make or sail ships, to dig, 
build houses, work on railways, or serve in the police. It is, 
first and foremost, because women, as a sex, do not do 
and cannot do these things — i.e. practically the whole of 
the material work of the world, requiring physical force and 
representing physical force — that women, as a sex, have no 
business with any of these things — nor with the political 
control of these things which votes imply. And it is because 
men — and men only — can do these things and represent 
this material force, that men, and men only, are entitled to 
the political control which in the last resort their muscular 
force has to make good and defend. 

To amalgamate material and moral power in the same 
hand inevitable tends to both tyranny and corruption. It 
makes the ruler oppressive and the moralist self-seeking. 
When the State begins to enforce its opinions it ends in 
persecution. When the priest is the master, he makes 
religion odious. The mother in the Home uses methods 
very different to those of the politician in the Senate; and 
she exerts a purer and a nobler power. Moralists, however 



128 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

wise and however stimulating, are often unwilling or un- 
able to measure countervailing interests and claims. And 
preachers, whatever their eloquence and their religious zeal, 
are not always to be followed in things of the world. Their 
counsels are always to be heard and respected, and indeed 
marked, learned, and inwardly digested — but they too 
often neglect the practical difficulties which make their 
counsels impracticable at the time. 

It is neither to deny nor to disparage the part in political 
life to be played by women, if we would liken their political 
action to that exerted throughout history by so many illus- 
trious teachers, moralists, and priests. Socrates, St. Paul, 
St. Francis, and Milton, would never have left the world 
types of noble morality if they had been empowered by law 
to compel their respective generations to follow their codes 
of life. Let the story of Plato's Utopia, and the rules of 
Dominic and Calvin be a warning. The less the spiritual 
forces are mixed up in government the more spiritual re- 
mains the influence and the more free from tyranny is the 
government. It is not to degrade women's part if we ask 
them to hold fast to that influence which they have and can 
use — the spiritual and moral authority — and not to diminish 
and debase it by grasping at the inferior part — that material 
force which they cannot use without soiling their own. 

I am not for imposing on women any disability which I 
am not willing personally to accept. The worst of all des- 
potisms it has been said is a " pedantocracy" — the rule of 
philosophers or moralists. Those who devote their whole 
attention to the theory of politics and the ethics of society, 
inevitably make unsatisfactory statesmen. Burke, Condor- 
cet. Mill, and Herbert Spencer were never born for poli- 
tics, and all of them made amazing practical blunders. 
Compromise is the essence of politics, and the statesman has 



VOTES FOR WOMEN 1 29 

daily to consider which of many bad, and some very danger- 
ous courses, is the least bad and the least injurious. It is 
often not even the second-best course which is the least 
impracticable. All courses are often full of danger, and 
some of them quite shameful or immoral. But the duty of 
the moralist is to avoid compromise with anything evil, as 
the duty of the theorist is to enforce principles in season 
and out of season. 

As for myself, in common with all those who charge them- 
selves with political principle and the ethics of the State, I 
have through life reserved myself to seeking to influence 
opinion, whilst keeping clear of political life. Except that 
I once allowed my name to be used to assert a principle in a 
famous contest, I have systematically refused to be nomi- 
nated for Parliament. Though I have been on the Register 
of several constituencies, both urban and rural, I have hardly 
ever voted in a parliamentary contest in fifty years. I have 
never troubled myself to ask if my name were, or were not, 
on this or that Register. I have taken the keenest interest 
in all the political contests of the last fifty years. And I 
have made every effort to influence opinion. But I always 
held that to be a candidate, or even on a candidate's com- 
mittee, would rather lessen than increase any influence I 
might have in moulding opinion. 

It is a fixed psychologic law that the earnestness of moral 
and spiritual emotion — which is the strength and beauty 
of the higher natures — too often shuts off from the ken of 
those most deeply moved the nice adjustment of balance 
in competing good and evil, usefulness and risk. St. Ber- 
nard, St. Francis, Fenelon, Wesley, the Slavery and the 
Drink Abolitionists, had noble messages to deliver, but they 
would prove most oppressive legislators and judges. Their 
very merit lay in their bold defiance of obstacles, their in- 



130 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

difference to all countervailing risks, their disdain of com- 
promise. But compromise is the daily and hourly necessity 
of practical affairs. And those who disdain compromise are 
ever on the verge of oppression and disaster, and too often 
face both together with a light heart. We are bound to hear 
and weigh all that such men can urge. But it is for men 
of a very different stamp — often it may be men of a stamp 
more common and less fine — to decide the issue and abide 
the result. 

Now women in the average, as a sex, share this nature. 
They form opinions more quickly, less patiently, less coolly 
than do men. Emotion, prejudice, sentiment, play a larger 
part in their decisions than in those of men. They are less 
in the habit of facing practical risks and dilemmas. They 
will not take pains to walk all round embarrassing crises 
before they decide; nor do they habitually weigh all sides 
of a question with a fair impartial temper. It would be 
laughable to tell us that men and women are equally fitted 
by nature to form a balanced judgment of this kind. Com- 
mon sense records the contrary as a fact. But all political 
questions and all parliamentary elections really turn, or 
ought to turn, on nicely balanced judgments of this sort. 

But there is a further reason for doubting the impartial 
judgment of women as a sex in the ineradicable tendency 
of the female mind to be swayed by the personal equation. 
When it is a question of deciding between candidates, when 
the personal character of a party leader, statesman, or orator 
is in issue, women are more open to improvise favourable or 
adverse opinions than are men. It is well that the personal 
bias should have due consideration, but it is a perpetual 
temptation to prejudice and injustice. Men never trust a 
woman to be judge in an intricate case of crime or an obscure 
conflict of civil rights. "Hard cases make bad law'^: — 



VOTES FOR WOMEN I3I 

and female judges would bring justice to shame. Who 
would trust a woman to pass sentence on batches of prisoners 
at ordinary assizes? The kind of crime charged, the age, 
sex, character of every plaintiff or defendant, prosecutor or 
prisoner, would disturb the mind of a woman, however 
learned in the law and familiar with crime. Sentences too 
harsh, or too light; judgments that might be good in ethics, 
but very bad in law — would be the result. Who would 
care to see a woman President of the Divorce Court? Who 
would trust a jury of women to try prisoners at the Central 
Criminal Court? For my own part, I would as soon see a 
woman hangman, or a female warder administering a flog- 
ging to a prisoner. 

This is no disparaging of Women. It is said in their 
honour and to their praise. If the hoydens who shout for 
Bung and ring bells are ready to laugh and jeer at such 
homely truths, women of sense and good feeling know that 
there are public duties for which their very virtues and re- 
finements disqualify them. They will amply bear me out 
in maintaining that women in the average decide mixed 
questions of right and wrong, safety and danger, profit or 
loss, rather under the impulse of feeling than after a dis- 
passionate balance of alternatives. Now the governing of 
states, problems of taxation, alliances, armaments of war, 
demand the utmost use of a dispassionate balance of alter- 
natives. It is little enough of this that the voters of to-day 
possess. Average women can hardly be said to exercise it 
at all. 

It is not to discredit women if we urge that, if women 
ever obtained a controlling voice over Parliament, the coun- 
try would be constantly committed to those causes which 
from time to time appeal to the imagination and the feel- 
ings, without due regard to all the cost, difficulties, and risks 



132 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

they might involve. Every "atrocity" indignation move- 
ment would be suddenly swollen into an international crisis. 
Alliances would be made on premature or impulsive grounds. 
National obligations would be piled up under some outburst 
of pity. Movements, leaders, and parties would be sup- 
ported or opposed on inadequate knowledge of facts, on 
trivial personal grounds, or in spite of obvious risks. The 
state budget would be concocted for reasons of sentiment. 
International alliances and menaces would be the "happy 
thoughts" of some moment of great excitement. And, with- 
out intending it or providing against it, the nation would be 
plunged into war. Thereupon the burden of new taxation 
would fall mainly on our sex ; the tangle of diplomacy would 
be wholly our task; and at sea and land the battles would 
be fought out only by men. 

I do not assert that all this is either probable or possible. 
It is an assumption based on the idea of women having 
obtained a controlling voice in Parliament. That, of course, 
in spite of their being a majority of adults, they npver could 
have. Physical force would come into play long before 
such a point was reached. But I do assert that the admis- 
sion of women to the parliamentary franchise on equal 
terms with men would have a tendency to bring the nation 
towards such, a state of things — intensifying all the evils 
of our present democracy, and destroying all the present 
value of the moral influence of women in things political. 

We are told — and it is most true — that national ex- 
penditure waits on national policy. It is even more true 
and more important, that peace and war depend on national 
policy. And national policy is a highly intricate and subtle 
compound of advantages and risks; ideals to be aimed at 
and difficulties to be overcome; compromises to the making 
of which problems moral, material, physical, sentimental, 



VOTES FOR WOMEN 133 

diplomatic, and strategic enter, cross and re-cross. They 
appeal alternately to passion, patriotism, caution, and fore- 
thought. They may redound to the honour of a nation, or 
they may ruin a nation. They are never simple matters, 
though they often look simple. And the consequences of a 
false step are terrible to contemplate. 

Now I say frankly that I do not trust the average woman 
to decide these complex issues. I know many able women 
whose opinion on great political questions I value highly, 
whose motives and enthusiasm I profoundly respect. But 
in an experience now of fifty years I cannot trust the judg- 
ment of even the most thoughtful women in all the matters 
of finance, armaments, alliances, and legislation which make 
up national policy. To speak the truth, I only know one 
woman whom I would always trust to come to a right deci- 
sion ; and she happens to be a resolute opponent of Votes for 
Women. 

It must be remembered that it is by possessing higher 
qualities — not for any inferiority of intelligence which 
makes the political judgment of the average woman un- 
trustworthy and unstable. The real objection to "Votes for 
Women," over and above that it risks imposing on men 
sacrifices of labour and life which women do not share, is 
this — that it degrades and weakens the moral and emotional 
influence which women indirectly give to men and have never 
failed to give. The power of women to moralise life and to 
modify action is not lost because it is exerted in society, 
in the home, in literature, in education. To sink this high 
and ennobling influence in the rough-and-tumble of elections 
would be to destroy it and debase it. 

Quite apart from the vulgar insolence of the disorderly 
girls, we have seen how of late years the demand for Votes 
has been worked by the mass of its advocates with a passion, 



134 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

an unreasoning spirit of mischief, a one-eyed defiance of all 
the public interests of the nation, and, alas ! with that spite 
and untruthfulness which is too often the failing of some 
good women even in a good cause. The agitation about 
Temperance, Contagious Diseases, Punishment for Crime, 
Marriage Laws, and the like, too often show how women, 
in pursuit of a movement they desire, develop a rancour, 
an injustice towards persons, a bitterness of temper, which 
cause them to fling away common sense, fairness, truth, and 
even decency. The old saw, however unjust in ordinary 
life, is too often true in politics : — aut amat, aut odit mulier, 
nihil est tertium. 

We have seen of late — we are destined often to see — 
furens quid femina possii. And this unfortunate tendency 
in the feminine organism — a tendency which is often shared 
by some noble-hearted men — will be immensely stimulated 
if women systematically engage in contested elections. Can 
the moral influence of women in public life be improved 
when husband and wife serve on opposed committees, per- 
haps ridicule and denounce rival candidates on their party 
platforms; when mother and daughter, sister and brother, 
vote against each other, and fight out at home the jeers, the 
falsehoods, and the taunts they have heard in the party 
meetings? Every home will be a small committee-room. 
And the father, who in old times was called the "Master of 
the House," will be heckled over dinner by his adult daugh- 
ters, and badgered to vote for some female fad of the hour. 

This is no fancy picture. . We have seen how easily in 
the more excitable natures the agitation for female suffrage 
stiffens into a kind of sex-war. This sex-war calls out all 
the latent discontent which too many women unconsciously 
nurse, and is often a mere mask to the wish for separation in 
families on more or less equivocal grounds. Equal electoral 



VOTES FOR WOMEN I35 

rights could not fail to inflame a standing war between the 
sexes, by giving equal power to man and woman where the 
practical responsibilities and capacities are not equal. Every 
man who has ever had to back a very unpopular cause, 
whether religious, social, or political, has often had to face 
the rancour, insults, and injustice, with which he has been 
treated by women who passionately espouse the opposite 
side. We have seen women of high character and attain- 
ments deformed under ardent zeal for a Cause into impla- 
cable and unfeeling enemies of men, whose only crime was 
that they obeyed a sense of public duty. This sinister tem- 
per must be greatly stimulated by introducing woman in the 
mass to the ordinary turmoil of elections. 

This is but an incident of the change, and, we may trust, 
one far from general. The universal and inevitable result 
of female franchise would be a subtle weakening of men's 
respect for women's opinion — and indeed soon a weaken- 
ing of men's respect for women. The woman's vote would 
always be actually or possibly on "the wrong side." Is the 
husband to "canvass" the wife, or the wife the husband? 
Is the daughter to "canvass" her mother, the brother, or 
the neighbour, till they promise "to vote straight"? Are 
wives, mothers, daughters, to attend the party meetings, to 
read the party journals, and search the electoral register? 
Unless they do, men will think their vote unmeaning — the 
result of prejudice or chance. How are women to be made 
fit to exercise the parliamentary franchise, unless they do 
all that men do in hot electioneering times? And will 
homes be more happy and more pleasant when they do 
these things? 

Till lately we have all felt easy that, in the hottest fight 
at elections, we could find peace at home, and need not 
carry on the wrangle of the street corner over a quiet supper. 



136 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

And the poor man felt safe that his neighbours had no 
means of getting behind the ballot, if he chose to hold his 
tongue. But if his wife or his daughter are keen for the 
"red" ticket, will they not worm it out of him that he voted 
"blue"? And will his supper be as good and as punctual 
when his wife is away listening to her favourite speaker, or 
is abusing the candidate "her old man" has promised to 
support? And will his daughter be all to him she used to 
be as he returned from work, when she is deep in the comic 
posters, fly-sheets, and ribald ballads of the day, or has 
come home hot from heckling a weak candidate about Sun- 
day shopping, local option, and vaccination? 

Jesting apart — and really these things are not mere 
jests — the serious prospect is that the change will be from 
the state of mind when men listen to women's opinion, 
value it, and give it weight, to the state of things when men 
will dispute with women about matters to which life tells 
them daily they are closer, and which they know better in 
practice. Of old, no opinion was more stimulating and 
more clarifying than the well-thought view of an able and 
high-minded woman on a great political crisis. It might 
not always be practicable, or complete in knowledge, or free 
from risk. But it was a thing to know and to weigh with 
care. Alas ! we know how in electoral contests, the great 
issues of right and wrong, wise policy or rash adventure, are 
obscured by petty details of administration, personal triviali- 
ties, and specious promises. It is to side-issues of this kind 
that the feminine instinct naturally turns. And to extend 
the parliamentary franchise to women will greatly increase 
the share of trivialities and personalities in deciding electoral 
contests. 

The parliamentary franchise can only be given to all 
adult women without exception. A limited extension of the 



VOTES FOR WOMEN I37 

franchise would be fiercely resisted by Labour, and in fact 
would only result in renewed struggles. But adult female 
suffrage would affect not only Parliament and elections, but 
every home and every man, woman, and child in its ulterior 
results. Its main support is the dogma of Democracy that 
every sane and adult man and woman are equal. All that 
I have argued as to the sexes turns upon the true doctrine, 
that men and women are never equal but different and 
mutually coincident. But if in many things women are far 
more fit to lead than are men, nothing has occurred to shake 
the ancient and eternal truth that men are far more fit than 
women to rule the State which, materially speaking, is mainly 
the work of men's toil, and which in the way of physical 
defence is solely the task of men's bodies and lives. 



VI 



CIVIL MARRIAGE 

The question of Lay versus Ecclesiastical Marriage has 
become a burning problem in some European countries, and 
gives rise in our own country to several irritating anomalies. 
It is ever at hand to bring about a conflict between the Law 
of the State and the most cherished institutions of Religion. 
We need say nothing now about the scandalous anomalies 
in the conflicting law of the three Kingdoms as to the Mar- 
riage rite. A much deeper question is at issue — one which 
has threatened a constitutional dead-lock in Hungary, and 
one which may easily lead to a bitter struggle in our own or 
any other country. 

The outrageous pretensions of certain Churches to ignore 
and eliminate the State from the Marriage Ceremony, the 
revolting indecorum of a civil marriage as practised in Eng- 
land, the natural abhorrence of most men and of nearly all 
women to accept the Registrar's off-hand blessing as an 
adequate Marriage rite, the indecency of sending for the 
legal representative of the State to attend the Church cere- 
mony, at which he is treated as a sort of unrecognised offlcial 
witness to be kept out of sight, like the confectioner who 
makes the wedding-cake — these things may at any hour 
land us in a very difficult dilemma. 

It is certain that a considerable number of English men 
and the immense majority of English women still look on 
the Marriage rite as having a sacramental or at least a reli- 
gious meaning. It is certain that a large and growing num- 

138 



CIVIL MARRIAGE 1 39 

ber of Englishmen look on it as a purely legal solemnity, and 
they endure the ecclesiastical rite as a mere accident like 
orange-blossom or the sugared cake. A very resolute minor- 
ity refuse to accept even this, and object to any ceremonial 
outside the Registrar's office. The various religious com- 
munions, each insisting on their own form of Marriage, are 
almost infinite. Many of these communions are too obscure, 
too much scattered, and not sufficiently settled, to make it 
possible for the State to accept their private, local. Registers 
as conclusive, or to confer on any spontaneous Little Bethe^ 
that may choose to call itself a communion, the legal authority 
to constitute a binding marriage — such as the Church in 
England has enjoyed for a thousand years. In the mean- 
time the diversity of sects and the conflict of opinions in- 
crease every day. Wedlock never will be, never can be con- 
fined within the limits of any Church sect, or opinion. Men 
and women, at any rate in the eye of the State, ought to be 
free to marry into or out of any church, any communion, any 
school of thought. Here is a dilemma fertile of strife, in 
which the partisans, first of Civil, then of Religious, Liberty, 
are equally hot, equally wrong, and equally right. 

As in so many other cases. Positivism offers a fair solution 
of the problem alike agreeable to Law and to Religion, to 
Church and to State, to the Secularist and to the Spiritualist. 
And it does this by holding fast to its cardinal doctrine — 
the docrtine which solves so many a political and religious 
controversy — to keep distinct but co-ordinate the physical 
coercion of Government and the moral and spiritual force of 
Belief, Devotion, or Opinion. Marriage must be treated as 
having a double character — legal and religious : legal for all, 
absolutely in the same way ; religious for those who choose, 
in any way they desire and approve at their sole discretion. 
The State must have its own ceremony, the same for all, 



I40 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

indispensable for all, without which there can be no marriage 
in law. After this, with this, before this (if they so please) 
any person or community must be free to hold its own reli- 
gious ceremonial — sacramental or secular, ethical or 
mystical. 

There are two entirely distinct sides to Marriage as a 
rite — one the lawful union for the purposes of law and the 
State ; one the spiritual consecration (for all who desire any at 
all) in such forms and by such functionaries as parties to 
the union hold binding on their conscience, and congenial to 
their religious feelings. The strife has arisen from the effort 
to coerce these two sides into some common rite, from the 
intolerant desire of statesmen to force religionists to accept 
their rite, and the equally intolerant desire of Churchmen to 
force the State to substitute the theological for the political 
sanction. To Positivists, Marriage is at the same time an 
act in law — a political function — and also a sacrament or 
religious consecration. Both are indispensable — perfectly 
distinct — alike honourable ; and both should be conducted 
with equal dignity and publicity. 

It needs no argument to show — what lies at the very root 
of law and indeed of civil Society — that the State has the 
highest interest in determining the conditions and forms of 
lawful marriage. The devolution of property, the rights of 
kinship and family, the whole field of personal law depend 
on certain solemn acts in the law deliberately concluded with 
the formalities recognised by law. This is perfectly indepen- 
dent of Church, nationality, religion, or opinion in any sort. 
In England, to be precise, a man and woman are lawful 
husband and wife when — and only when — they have con- 
sented to fulfil the conditions and to observe the formalities 
recognised in English courts of justice as constituting marriage. 
And this is the case whether both or either be Christian, Jew, 



CIVIL MARRIAGE 14I 

Shaker, or Secularist. The law accepts in England specified 
forms only, and has strictly limited these forms. 

If every sect or communion could devise its own forms, 
appeal to its own register, and compel the judges of the land 
to recognise these, confusion and uncertainty would result 
from the infinite variety of religious congregations and the 
more or less casual character of each local register. Courts 
of justice would be involved in endless inquiries as to whether 
any legal marriage had been performed at all, what persons 
were legitimate, married, or single; and what was a com- 
petent record of any given wedlock. The State has the highest 
possible interest in securing public formalities, simple and 
notorious acts in law, and an unimpeachable record of the 
law, such as could not be mislaid or tampered with. What- 
ever else is done, the State is bound to insist on some definite, 
public, uniform rite or set of rites. 

In the heyday of Churches the matter was very simple. 
The whole nation, or an immense majority of it, accepted 
the Church rite, and the State adopted that act as its own. 
It constituted the priest its own Registrar, and gave legal 
effect to the parish book. The civil law of the State practically 
accepted the ecclesiastical law of the Church, and the partner- 
ship worked, on the whole, sufficiently well. Scandals, con- 
fusion, and anomalies arose; and these were from time to 
time dealt with by legal decision, or by legislation. The 
State treated the parson as its own official, put him under very 
severe penalties in case of any irregularity, prescribed hours, 
licences, constituted lay courts for marriage law, and in 
effect amalgamated the State formality and Church cere- 
monial. 

This worked fairly well so long as the whole nation practi- 
cally adhered to one Church, or accepted the State Church as 
its own. The reformed Church of England seized on the 



142 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

privileges of the Catholic Church, and at once found the 
marriage law a potent engine of spiritual ascendancy. But 
the whole case was altered when dissenting sects began to 
multiply; and still more when a resolute minority revolted 
from any theological communion. The cry of civil and 
religious liberty was raised in all quarters in such menacing 
tones that legislation had to interfere. And legislation has 
at present stopped at the weak and indecorous compromise 
that we now see. The Catholic Church, with its growing 
strength and pretensions, is very naturally indignant that the 
Established priests should monopolise their ancient privilege 
of performing legal marriage without the intervention of 
a State official, and it indemnifies itself by treating the State 
official with studied contempt, which it must be said that a 
common clerk, busy only about his fees, cheerfully accepts. 

Every concession made to this or that powerful com- 
munity, stimulates the rival sects to ask for the same. Public 
opinion is not yet prepared to put Catholic priests and Shaker 
expounders on the same legal footing as the Rector of the 
Parish. Nor could the law courts accept any bit of paper 
which professed to record a marriage as performed by the 
local shoemaker in what Churchmen so insolently called " a 
hedge-side tin tabernacle," or, indeed, for that matter, in' a. 
common public-house by the publican himself. There are 
a thousand communions which profess to have their own 
religious ideas. They all object to special privileges being 
conferred on any of their rivals. To give them all equal 
rights of celebrating legal marriage would turn law into a 
quagmire and law courts into a bear garden. There can be 
no peace whilst this growing and burning problem is left open. 
It goes down to the root question of an Established Church, 
and forms one of its hopeless dilemmas. 

To one plain and simple solution we must come. What- 



CIVIL MARRIAGE 1 43 

ever else is done, the State must insist on its own independent, 
uniform, lay act in the law : distinct from any religious rite, 
and not affected by any religious rite, antecedent subsequent, 
or simultaneous. The State must have its own official, its 
own distinct ceremony, its own national register, and its own 
absolute record in its own keeping. With all this duly done 
and witnessed — valid, unimpeachable marriage is con- 
cluded in the eye of the State and in judgment of law. With- 
out this — no marriage, no legitimacy, no legal consequences 
from any pretended ceremony of marriage. No citizen 
need in the eye of the law do more: but no citizen can be 
married with less. With this, before this, after this, any 
citizen can perform any ceremony, take any sacrament, or 
conform to any ritual that suits his conscience, and that his 
own religious communion pleases to offer him. He may take 
a dozen sacraments and go through a series of different cere- 
monies (as a noble pair is said to have done, alas ! unsuc- 
cessfully !). But of that the law will know nothing. That 
is between himself and his spiritual advisers. 

It is ridiculous to pretend that this legal ceremony can be 
a hardship on Churchmen, or that it is putting pressure on 
their conscience to compel them to appear before a lay rep- 
resentative of the State. They can hardly deny that marriage 
has in the eye of the law and for purposes of civil society 
a lay aspect, civil effects, and purely legal incidents. If they 
desire courts of justice to give effect to the rights and obliga- 
tions of husband ancf wife, parent and child, to regulate rights 
of inheritance, and to define legitimacy and bastardy, they 
cannot complain if the State requires these lay and legal 
results of the status produced by marriage to be officially 
confirmed, witnessed, and recorded. 

It is as silly to complain of compulsory civil marriage as it 
would be to complain of compulsory execution by deed of a 



144 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

binding marriage settlement. It would be idle to ask a court 
of justice to accept the oral evidence of a priest as to a verbal 
settlement of an estate at the altar. And it would be idle to 
maintain that the conscience of bride and bridegroom was 
wounded because a solicitor insisted on their executing a deed 
on parchment. Civil effects in law ought to follow from lay 
acts in the law. And it is as childish to talk about conscience? 
when for purely civil purposes bride and bridegroom are called 
to appear before an officer of the State, as it would be to 
talk about conscience when he or she are required to give 
evidence before a magistrate. We shall be told next that these 
tender consciences forbid them to make a legal will, and that 
judges must take in lieu of a last testament the recollections 
of the clergyman who attended at the bedside. Perhaps it 
is an unholy act to register the birth of a child before a lay 
official, and conscience requires Churchmen to do it only 
before a priest in baptism. 

We know very well what is behind all this transparent 
hypocrisy. What Churchmen, whether Anglican or Catholic, 
want to come to is this, that there can be no marriage without 
the sacerdotal consecration and the theological sacrament. 
They want to seize upon the fundamental institution of civil 
society as an indirect engine of spiritual propaganda. This 
is merely the old mediaeval intolerance which we have swept 
away for ever. It is Torquemada and James II. and the 
rest of the persecuting fanaticism in a new form. Here we 
will fight it out to the death. Marriage' is the great universal 
foundation of human society. And we will never suffer it to 
be degraded into being made the back-door into any Church. 

The wise and simple principle of the Civil Code of France 
is necessary and applicable to all Western Europe ; and the 
practice of France is a model and example to civilised nations. 
Even in France, the civil marriage is greatly deficient in 



CIVIL MARRIAGE I45 

dignity and in uniformity. In England it is made a squalid 
scramble. What is needed is to invest the legal ceremony 
of marriage with all the solemnity of a trial before a judge 
of the High Court. If Churchmen complain of having 
to attend a common clerk in a frowsy ofhce, the answer is 
that civil marriage ought to be made as impressive and 
artistic as a marriage in Church ; and the Registrar should 
be made an officer of equal rank with a priest. During the 
Commonwealth, Oliver would himself, as head of the State, 
perform the marriage ceremony, in full uniform with his 
Bible and sword before him. We should not like the King 
in epaulets to marry us ; but the idea is suggestive, and Oliver 
was a genuine Independent or spiritual anarchist. After the 
legal ceremony, the couple would be perfectly free to resort 
to any religious ceremony, or to none. They may defer the 
religious ceremony as long as they please, or celebrate it as 
often or in any way they please. They may treat the civil 
marriage as null and void in the sight of God and the Church. 
That is their affair. But the State will treat any mere reli- 
gious ceremony as per se null and void, so far as civil rights 
and obligations are concerned. 

In the meantime let it be understood that to Positivists 
the religious marriage is a matter of religious duty. To 
Positivists, Marriage is a Sacrament — a sacrament of pro- 
found importance and inestimable value. By sacrament 
they mean the solemn and public pledge to fulfil a social, 
personal, and religious duty. In the sanctity, indissolubility, 
sacramental efficacy of Marriage, Positivists can yield to no 
Churchman, Protestant or Catholic. To this aspect of the 
great institution I now turn. My first purpose was only to 
maintain as the rational solution of a social dilemma. Civil 
Marriage first — independent, obligatory, and imiform. 



VII 

RELIGIOUS MARRIAGE 

The great institution of Marriage has necessarily a double 
character — legal and religious — and this double character 
must be guaranteed by two distinct authorities and by sepa- 
rate rites and forms. The legal character of Marriage is 
indispensable, uniform for all, and concerns society, the 
family relations, and property. The religious character of 
Marriage depends on the choice of the married pair, may vary 
according to their conscience and communion, and ought to 
be entirely independent of the State and its officials. The 
attempt to combine these two sides of Marriage in the same 
act, to make either of them dependent on the other, to fuse 
them in the same ceremony, is retrograde and full of abuses. 
It has caused continual strife; and, as the decay of the 
Churches increases, it is certain to cause far wider convul- 
sions. 

The entrance of a new life into the community or into 
the church, the exit of a life from society, and its passing into 
the world of the departed — birth and death — also have 
their double character, their official and their religious for- 
malities ; and no one attempts to confound them. The State 
registers the birth, and it registers the death, of every one of 
its citizens according to certain legal forms and by the hand 
of its own servants. It leaves the family of the infant, or of 
the deceased, entirely free to choose its own form of baptismal 
or of burial service, to conduct them at any time and in any 
mode they please, or else to dispense with religious ser- 

146 



RELIGIOUS MARRIAGE 



147 



vice altogether. Precisely the same rules should apply to 
Marriage. 

But, though Positivists are the first to insist on Civil Mar- 
riage as paramount, obligatory, and uniform for all who 
marry within the State, they are consistent in upholding quite 
as resolutely the Religious Marriage, the sacrament of Mar- 
riage, and the sacerdotal consecration of this great indis- 
soluble bond of society. This is a cardinal illustration of 
the foundation idea of Positivism — the separation and co- 
ordinate authority of temporal and spiritual powers; coercive 
government on the one hand, and moral and intellectual con- 
trol on the other hand. In the decay of social organisations, 
Positivists stand almost alone in being equally strenuous 
supporters of both. There are many schools, both absolutist 
and socialist, who uphold the coercive powers of the State; 
and there are many religionists, both Catholic and mystical, 
who wish to strengthen the power of some Church. Positivists 
(almost alone) desire at once a strong State and an indepen- 
dent Church. 

Positivists are certainly alone, amongst the non-theological 
schools of opinion, in seeking to make the religious character 
of Marriage both more definite and more impressive, in 
treating it as a very real sacrament, in making it a cardinal 
feature of the religious life. The only criticism that they offer 
to the ecclesiastical view of Marriage is, that all existing 
Christian Churches treat Marriage far too loosely, do not 
respect its sacramental importance, and allow it to be regarded 
as a civil state primarily and chiefly. Even the Catholic 
Church is far too ready to play fast and loose with its "dis- 
pensations" to the high and mighty, fails to rise to its real 
spiritual dignity, does not treat it as "indissoluble" in the 
spiritual sense, and has dishonored it by the vicious institution 
of celibacy of the priesthood. 



148 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

As to other Christian Churches, they have made no effective 
stand against the demoralising progress of Divorce: indeed, 
in many parts both of the Old and the New World they ac- 
quiesce in a practice of Divorce carried to the point of re- 
ducing marriage to a union during pleasure. The Anglican 
marriage service is futile and undignified almost to the point 
of being a public scandal. And there is hardly any side of 
the religious action of the Christian Churches where they 
are more manifestly in arrear of the best moral and spiritual 
ideas of the age, than in their obsolete, insincere, and unc- 
tuous language as to Marriage. 

We say that Marriage is a Sacrament, meaning by that 
old Roman term for a public pledge of faithfulness, the pledge 
given by the wedded pair that they will love, serve, and honour 
each other, and also the Providence that they acknowledge 
as surrounding their lives. The public ceremonial, the 
presence of their friends and fellow-believers, consecrates 
this obligation they take, invests it with public acceptance, 
and dedicates it anew to the Human Family. 

"Marriage," says Auguste Comte, "is the simplest and most perfect 
mode of man's social life: the only society we can ever form, where 
entire identity of interests obtains. It is a union wherein each is neces- 
sary to the moral development of the other; the woman surpassing the 
man in tenderness, even as the man excels the woman in strength. 

"Marriage joins together two beings to the mutual perfecting and 
service of each other, by a bond which no shadow of rivalry can darken. 
Its essential purpose is to bring to completeness the education of the 
heart. Attachment, in which it begins, leads on to the spirit of rever- 
ence, and that to the practice of goodness; each spouse is in turn pro- 
tector and protected; the one being richer in affection, as the other in 
force. 

"When two beings so complex and yet so different as man and 
woman are united together, the whole of life is hardly long enough for 
them to know each other fully and to love each other perfectly. 

"The marriage bond is the only one in which none can share, and 
which none can put asunder; and so it outlasts even death itself. For 
time which tends to weaken all other domestic ties, does but cement 
more closely this one — the only human union of which we can say: 
'These two shall be one.'" 



RELIGIOUS MARRIAGE 



149 



The Positivist Marriage seeks to impress these truths on 
the pair themselves and on all others who attend the cere- 
mony: teaching that Marriage, rightly understood, is the 
great social instrument of religion; the final act of moral 
education for the man and for the woman ; the link between 
Person and Humanity ; the stepping-stone from the individual 
self to the social community. The Home, centred in Mar- 
riage, is the image or rudimentary type of Humanity, with 
its mottoes of Love, Order, and Progress — Love being the 
originating principle of marriage; Order, or the due ordering 
of the Home and its mutual duties the basis; the moral 
progress of husband and wife in mutual sympathy and co- 
operation being the end of Marriage. The two dangers 
which beset marriage in our own day are : — first, the in- 
creasing facilities for Divorce; and secondly, the increasing 
tendency of women to forsake the moral direction of the 
Family and of the Home for the vain competition in the 
practical labour of man. There is everywhere in democratic 
societies a movement to render Divorce common, and re- 
marriage a matter of course. And the note of modern free- 
thought is the assimilation of all functions of man and woman. 
Both tendencies must be fatal to true marriage. The first 
saps the very idea of permanent union: the second poisons 
the moral purpose of Marriage itself. The task of Positivism 
is to restore the institution of Marriage which even Catho- 
lic Christianity does not adequately defend. Its essential 
conditions are — the exclusive and indissoluble form of 
Marriage, and the setting free the wife to be the moral Head 
of the Home. 

Marriage is the eternal devotion of one man to one woman 
— a bond which no one can put asunder and which normally 
should survive death itself. To reject this last condition is 
to deny the continuance of a spiritual life for a day beyond 



150 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the limits of corporal life on earth. Any view of the pro- 
longation of a moral and spiritual being beyond death must 
necessarily involve the spiritual prolongation of the Marriage 
union. We have abstained both at Newton Hall and in 
Paris from exacting any formal Pledge from those who accept 
Positivist Marriage that they will never enter into a second 
union : for we are not prepared to impose vows on a distant 
future. We leave the married pair free to act on their mature 
judgment by the light of a free conscience, impressing on them 
at the great crisis of their moral life, in the very ceremony 
of Marriage itself, that this obligation of indissoluble Mar- 
riage is bound up with the foundation of our faith. 

The Marriage Service which has been used in Newton 
Hall thus sums up our conception of this institution. 

May this new Home be a source of Happiness and Goodness within, 
of strength and an example without. May the Master of this new 
Household make it a pattern of Industry, Good Order, and Moral 
Well-being, in all the acts of a good citizen and a just Head of an honour- 
able Family. May the Mistress of this new household make it a pattern 
of Tenderness, Purity, and Devotion, in all the things that belong to 
true and perfect wife. And if this Household shall hereafter be blessed 
with children, may they be trained up in all things that belong to love 
and goodness; first by their Mother, then by both Parents equally, till 
at last they be worthy to enter into the training and the Service of Society. 
Thus we would trust that all the great principles of our Faith may be 
here expressed and illustrated afresh. May all they of this Household, 
resting on good Order, inspired by Love, and striving after moral Im- 
provement, be seen for ever to Live for others, and, as they Live openly, 
may they live in the spirit of Order and of Progress — so that a new and 
worthy Family may be this day added to our country; imaging to us 
all, whilst it reaUses and prospers in, the great life of Hvunanity itself. 



VIII 

MARRIAGE LAW CONFLICTS 

The questions about Civil and Religious Marriage are 
again in an acute stage, and have received a new phase by 
the important decision of the present Bishop of London, 
that he will visit with his displeasure any of his clergy who 
should celebrate the remarriage of a person against whom 
a decree of divorce has been pronounced. By this act it would 
seem that the Church takes up a ground opposed to that of 
the law and also to that of average current opinion. The 
marriage law and the law courts put no difficulty in the way 
of the remarriage of any divorced person ; and public opinion 
certainly favours it, especially where it promises a new life 
of happiness, or an act of reparation. It may surprise some 
readers to be told that the Positivist theory of marriage offers 
the only reasonable and iinal solution of this problem. And 
it may surprise them still more to be told that the Positivist 
in this matter sides with the Churchman and the Catholic 
against any religious consecration of such a marriage. 

The revival of bitter controversies about remarriage after 
divorce, or with a sister of a deceased wife, makes it opportune 
to review the whole problem : — 

1. Marriage has a double character: legal and religious. 

2. There should therefore be a double ceremony, each 
quite distinct. 

3. The legal ceremony must be compulsory, uniform, 
general. 

4. The religious ceremony should conform to the rules 

151 



152 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

accepted by the communion to which the parties belong, or 
to the individual conscience. 

5. The religious ceremony should be entirely at the option 
of the parties. 

6. It should have no legal effect or conditions. 

7. Every communion, and every minister, should be equally 
free to confer or to withhold such ceremony. 

The bitter struggle about the law of marriage arises from 
the effort to combine the legal and the religious side of marriage 
in a single rite. The State still hands over one of its funda- 
mental duties to a number of contending sects. The Church 
still strives to maintain an obsolete monopoly, and to enforce 
the substitution of a theological for a political sanction. 
Both State and Church are dishonoured by the struggle. 
Law, order, and consciences are equally offended. 

I. The State has the highest interest in maintaining a 
uniform, public, simple form of lawful marriage. Property, 
family rights, personal duties and liabilities, all hang thereon. 
In the battle of a hundred sects and the growing distrust 
of theology, it is a fatal error for the State to abdicate its 
task in favour of discordant Churches, and to suffer them to 
keep its registers. The State is bound to require as a con- 
dition of legal marriage a definite, public, uniform rite. 
To this the State must eventually resort. 

II. To a very large majority of English men, and to almost 
all English women, marriage seems to demand a religious 
sanction of some kind, over and above any legal sanction. 
This is entirely the Positivist theory and settled practice. 
And the religious character of marriage is carried even 
further by us than by any Christian Church. 

III. As the legal consequences of marriage upon property, 
family, and personal rights are necessarily binding on all 
persons whatever their opinions, religion, or Church, the 



MARRIAGE LAW CONFLICTS 1 53 

legal rite must be obligatory, uniform, and technical, with 
a ceremony at once simple, official, and formal. It is an 
idle prejudice, or an insolent pretension, to assert that sub- 
mitting to this legal formality can offend conscience any 
more than an ofhcial certificate of birth or of death. Birth, 
marriage, death are events of which the interests of the public 
demand strict official registration and publicity. 'For any 
Church to demand that the legal character of marriage can 
only be created by religious consecration is an arrogant rem- 
nant of superstition. 

IV. Every community which attaches any value to re- 
ligion in any form will naturally insist on giving a religious 
character to marriage. The effects of marriage both on per- 
sonal life and social relations are so obvious and important 
that marriage is necessarily bound up with the root ideas of 
religion in any form. Positivism not only actively supports 
the essentially religious character of marriage, but it seeks 
to develop this religious character in ways unattempted by 
any Church, even by the Catholic Church of the Middle 
Ages. In the first place. Positivism not only frankly accepts 
the lay ceremony of legal marriage as indispensable, but 
insists on it as a necessary preliminary rite. Next, it insists 
on the purely voluntary character of the religious ceremony — 
voluntary on both sides — the Church being as free to refuse, 
as the parties are free to dispense with, any religious con- 
secration, if they please. 

To Positivists, Marriage, in its religious side, is o. Sacrament 
— meaning thereby a public pledge by the wedded pair that 
they will love, serve, and honour each other, whereon the 
consecration of the Church, so far representing Humanity, 
is publicly bestowed on them to stimulate their good inten- 
tions. This consecration, or sacrament, is not conferred as 
of course, or as a mere legal formula. Almost every Church, 



154 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Catholic or Protestant, consents to marry persons of notorious 
evil lives, or even hardened criminals. The motive, no doubt, 
is the idea that marriage obviates sin, and the Church, by 
exercising its functions of marrying, asserts its own ascendancy 
in private and public life. The Positivist Church, disclaiming 
any such idle pretensions, and fully recognising the primary 
function of the State to order the conditions of legal marriage, 
is free to judge whether a religious consecration should pro- 
perly be added to the legal rite. There is in this no hardship 
on the parties, and no abandonment to sin if such consecra- 
tion is refused, for the legal rite is open to all and is sufficient 
for every secular interest. The Christian Churches, however, 
as a matter of course, perform the marriage ceremony for 
adulterers and rogues indiscriminately. And a parson of 
the Establishment can hardly exercise any discretion in the 
matter. The Positivist Church, on the other hand, is per- 
fectly free to exercise an efficient moral discipline over those 
whose consciences it binds. 

As to the burning questions of marriage with a deceased 
wife's sister, or the marriage of divorced persons, the position 
of the Positivist Church is perfectly simple. It does not 
extend the religious consecration to any second marriage 
whatever ; and consequently for the Positivist Church neither 
question has any place. All second marriages remain the 
exclusive affair of the State, and Positivists frankly acknow- 
ledge the legal marriage performed by a State functionary to 
be perfectly adequate and binding in law. I am not aware 
that Positivism has ever expressed any collective opinion as 
to marriage with a deceased wife's sister. As to the marriage 
of divorced persons. Positivism does not favour divorce at all, 
except in the case of a criminal condemned to penal servitude 
for life, as does French law. It is not necessary here to en- 
large on the Positivist doctrine that true marriage should 



MARRIAGE LAW CONFLICTS 1 55 

be indissoluble even by death. The whole of this rests on the 
principle of subjective immortality, or the survival of the soul 
in the spirit of others. Positivism offers no bar to the legal 
remarriage of those whose consorts are dead ; but it does not 
offer religious consecration to any remarriage in that or any 
other condition. So far as I know, the Positivist rite of 
marriage has never yet been celebrated in the case of any 
second marriage, either in this country or abroad. Re- 
marriage has been left to the law, with which Positivist 
religion does not affect to interfere. 

The very large question of the persistence of the marriage 
bond even after the death of one spouse, a point on which 
the Religion of Humanity goes far beyond the Catholic 
Church in its reverence for the sanctity of marriage, is a 
matter too large and complex to be touched on here. It is 
bound up with the Positivist ideal of marriage in its most 
sacred and profound type. The marriage rite as frequently 
performed in Newton Hall repeats the emphatic words of 
Auguste Comte thereon, but neither in Newton Hall, nor by 
Pierre Laffitte in Paris, has any pledge not to marry again 
been ever demanded of the married pair. 

The bitter controversies we see to-day can only be closed 
in one way, the recognition of the double character of mar- 
riage by a double and distinct rite, first legal, and then re- 
ligious. Positivists heartily support those who claim the 
freedom of a simple legal rite as adequate and conclusive. 
They as heartily support the claim of the Churches to en- 
force their own freedom to give or withhold religious conse- 
cration upon any such marriage. It is a striking example 
of the power of the great Positivist principle — the indepen- 
dence and separation of temporal and spiritual authority. 



IX 



FUNERAL RITES 

The question of funeral rites and the disposal of the dead 
is one which touches Religious Reformers in a very special 
degree. To all who are simply nominal adherents to any 
theological communion, or to all who are simply indifferent 
as to all rites, creeds, or customs in relation to the dead, no 
question arises. They are content to leave such things to 
those who come after them, or to those who care to occupy 
themselves with concerns of the kind. The mere Agnostic 
has nothing to suggest, nothing to object : he is usually in- 
terred with Christian rites : and eminent Agnostics, when 
pressed as to their wishes, have been known to reply — What 
can it matter to me what they like to do with my bones? 

Positivists are in a very different case. They are not in- 
different in things religious : they are not content simply to 
conform with the lip or to bow the knee in the Temple as 
a conventional form: they are not Agnostics, in the sense 
that the Agnostic is one who plants himself firmly on the rock 
of Ignorance. Positivists profess to have a religious faith, 
adequate to guide them in the problems of life and death. 
Though they have no set ritual, they have a decided sense of 
the deep reaction of public expression upon inward con- 
victions. They seek to emphasise all the great phases of 
human life in their relations to the social communion, above 
all the relation of the living to the dead. The Religion of 
Humanity is, on one side of it, a rationalised and spiritualised 
Worship of the Dead, in so far as it seeks to order the life of 

156 



FUNERAL RITES 157 

man by reference to the Past, Present, and Future of Man- 
kind. We must, therefore, regard it as one of its prime 
duties to invest with a rehgious sanction the close of life, and 
the rational disposal of the dead by the reverent care of the 
living. 

Theological opinion, indeed current opinion, is wont to 
regard the disposal of the dead as a practical test of conviction. 
A man who is willing to pass out of the world with theological 
blessings and to be buried with priestly rites is popularly 
supposed to be "reconciled" to the true Church, whatever 
may have been his avowed opinions in his days of health and 
strength. And in the Sacramental Communions fraud, 
cruelty, and force in securing such death-bed reconciliation 
are thought to be venial acts of piety, as if a man could be 
saved from hell-fire by some miraculous talisman or hypo- 
dermic injection. 

There are special difficulties that confront all non-Chris- 
tians. The law permits only " Christian " Services in parish 
graveyards, and most of the available cemeteries are con- 
trolled by Boards and clergy nervously afraid of any innova- 
tion, of anything which might cause public discussion and 
affect dividends. 

Agnostics are said to be at liberty to put their departed 
brethren in the ground without the intervention of a priest 
and without a word spoken. But anything said or done 
must depend on the sufferance and accidental consent of 
trustees and committees who are often timid and prejudiced. 
As to cemeteries of their own, or even parts of cemeteries 
under their own control. Religious Reformers are as yet not 
sufficiently numerous, and not locally near each other so as 
to make this feasible. They ought to bear in mind that, 
unless they choose in their lifetime to give very distinct and 
formal directions as to their own burial, they may become 



158 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the object of conventional rites which cannot be anything 
but a mockery of their own professions, and wliich must cast 
a certain public slur on their sincerity or their foresight. 

It is impossible to enter into details or lay down any general 
rules for guidance in such a matter. Each case depends on 
its own special circumstances of family, place of residence, 
property in a particular grave, and various personal con- 
ditions. The only general advice that can be given is for 
individuals carefully to think out their own case, and try to 
realise what might happen upon his or her sudden death. 
And then, having carefully thought out the probable con- 
ditions and defined their own wishes, their duty is to put 
these wishes in definite instructions, and make these instruc- 
tions known to and immediately accessible to their near 
relations or friends. Old-fashioned and half-hearted people 
fondly imagine that they have done enough when they can 
say to themselves "that they have provided for this in their 
will." That would be a very poor security to trust. It may 
do for persons with settled estates, mausoleums of their 
own, and family solicitors. In other cases arrangements for 
a funeral are often made within twenty-four hours, long 
before any will is seen or heard of. It is quite proper, even 
for those who have but small estates to dispose of, to make 
a legal will as to their last wishes, and to embody in this 
precise directions as to burial. But in most cases this latter 
will prove idle words, unless these directions are known to, 
or easily and always accessible by, the immediate family. 
In making these directions we have to remember that any 
sort of public participation in interment by friends, and any 
attempt to speak in their name, must absolutely depend on 
the sufferance or accidental inadvertence of the authorities 
for the moment controlling the graveyard or cemetery. 
Priests are not disposed to surrender one tittle of their ex- 



FUNERAL RITES 1 59 

elusive rights over "consecrated" ground. They have often 
an indirect control over the other portion of a public cemetery; 
and non-Christians or Agnostics have no "rights" — except 
the right to put their departed friends in the ground without 
a word. 

Anything in the shape of a non-Christian ceremony at the 
graveside is thus practically out of the question — partly 
because it must be at the will of changeable and timid Boards 
whose main ideas are commercial, tempered by prejudice 
and convention — partly because our climate prohibits any- 
thing but a few hurried sentences, not seldom uttered in a 
storm or in the midst of a most unedifying scramble, which, 
in the case of a person known to the public, sometimes be- 
comes a mob. The Continental practice of a set of "orations " 
over the coffin is justly odious to English habits, and is re- 
pulsive to all sense of religion and reverence. It often de- 
generates into an irritating form of political manifesto or 
meeting. The use of the Nonconformist "Chapel" depends, 
like everything in the commercial cemeteries, on the tem- 
porary sufferance of the Board; and it is usually quite as 
distinctly marked with Biblical emblems and associations 
as any Church, with the further objection of being bare and 
ugly. A rite in a " Chapel," which professes to be evangelical 
but not ecclesiastical, is necessarily an uncomfortable make- 
shift in a wrong place. 

I cannot see that burial can be more of a domestic concern 
than marriage, or the presentation of a child, or the con- 
secration of any function or office. On the contrary, it seems 
to me far more a public concern than any other act of our 
lives, and such is the instinct and practice of mankind in all 
ages. Positivism, in what Comte has called sacraments, 
has immensely increased the claim of religion to impress with 
a social and solemn meaning each act in the drama of human 



l6o REALITIES AND IDEALS 

life, and that even more for its reaction on the community 
than its effect on the person himself. We cannot, even if we 
would, reduce to a purely domestic concern, as if it were an 
incident like disease or the loss of income, the last passing 
away from the sight of men, and the last farewell of those 
who would bring to so momentous an occasion their tribute 
of love and honour. Funeral rite of some kind there must 
be, unless we are to crush out the spontaneous sentiments of 
natural man. 

Under these circumstances, it seems to me that the obvious 
and inevitable course is to look for some kind of funeral rite 
to evolve itself in that place in which the ordinary meetings 
may be held. There the deceased has been accustomed to 
join with his fellow-believers, and there, with all the associa- 
tions and habits of the place, they can, without disturbance or 
conflicting emotions, take a last farewell of their friend and 
colleague. In my opinion the presence of the body, or, at 
least, of the urn containing the cremated ashes, is a very im- 
portant and natural element of anything which is to distinguish 
a funeral ceremony from a memorial speech. In the next 
Essay I have considered cremation, a practice which I hold 
to be really indispensable for the social and religious disposal 
of the dead, and the only mode in which, under the conditions 
of our city life, we can visibly retain their dust in our midst. 
I am quite aware of the practical difhculties which surround 
us. But many of these difficulties, it seems to me, spring 
from our inveterate habits of placing personal and domestic 
considerations above our social duties and loyalty to our faith. 



X 



CREMATION 

There is a grave duty incumbent on all who are not genuine 
Christian believers to provide for the decent disposal of their 
own remains in a manner worthy of the faith they profess, 
and I have touched on some of the special difficulties that 
they have to meet. It is not necessary to enlarge on the 
very intimate way in which the end of objective life and the 
continuance of subjective life after death is bound up with 
the Religion of Humanity, and how greatly that Religion 
tends to consecrate the social obligations involved in every 
marked stage of our active life upon earth. The close of 
every worthy life puts the seal upon the whole career amongst 
our fellow-men, and opens to each of us a new and continuous 
existence, even on this earth, in the memories and influences 
we leave to survivors and descendants — a continuous ex- 
istence no less solemn, and far more real, than the glorified 
indolence of the conventional Heaven. In point of fact, 
there can be no religious duty of deeper significance in the 
Religion of Humanity than the solemn commemoration of the 
final close of our visible career on earth, and the inaugura- 
tion of the invisible and unlimited career of our communion 
with the vast organism of civilised Humanity, into which 
every worthy life is incorporated, and by which and through 
which alone Humanity itself exists, works, thinks, and lives. 
It is hardly necessary to show that any such commemora- 
tion must have a social, a public, at the very least some 
congregational, character. The instinct and practice of man- 

M l6l 



1 62 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

kind in all ages and under all religions, suffice to prove that 
we cannot limit the disposal of the dead to a purely domestic 
concern, as if it were the birthday or the sickness of some 
private person which need affect no one outside the family. 
The fellow-believers of every active non-Christian religionist 
are deeply concerned in the close of his active co-operation 
in their midst, and in the opening of his spiritual and purer 
influence over them and their descendants in memory and in 
result. It would be an outrage on the deepest sympathies of 
mankind if we attempted to proscribe any kind of ceremonial 
rite, any gathering of the friends and colleagues of the dead 
person together to take farewell of their friend and to give 
expression to all they feel of honour and of regret. Funeral 
rite of some public kind is a necessity of human nature. It 
is urgent to consider how best to adapt such a rite to our 
circumstances and our faith. 

The Burials Act has been expressly worded to exclude any 
ceremony in "consecrated" ground not of a Christian kind, 
and this limitation must be carefully considered as strictly 
excluding non-Christian interment in "consecrated" ground 
— i.e. in any burial-ground under the control of priests — 
unless with the degrading condition of complete silence. 
Even in "unconsecrated," i.e. in public, burial-grounds, the 
use of any chapel is purely permissive, undetermined, and 
subject to theological associations. It seems to follow that, 
until non-Christian communities possess burial-grounds of 
their own, with their own chapels attached to them, they 
must either accept such housing on sufferance as they may 
chance to find, or else they must hold any definite funeral rite 
they choose to have in their own place of ordinary meeting. 
There are very considerable difficulties at present in the way 
of any of these courses. 

The enormous extent of the continuous tract of houses 



CREMATION 1 63 

called London, and the distance of most of the cemeteries 
outside of even this vast area, the scattered residences of 
fellow-citizens and fellow-believers in this London (often at 
distances of ten or twelve miles from each other), the fact 
that many of them have family graves in different places 
and have laid dear ones in these graves at different times, the 
objections we all naturally feel to run counter to family 
affections and traditions where husband and wife, parent and 
child, do not share a common faith — all these things must 
retard the institution of anything like a common non-Christian 
cemetery with appropriate buildings for any funeral rite. 
On the other hand, to transport the body in its cofSn from 
the house of death to the central Hall, and thence to carry 
it back to some outlying cemetery, may often involve a very 
fatiguing and costly journey, amounting in the whole to 
twenty or thirty miles, beside a very serious demand on the 
strength and leisure time of men and women who are often 
over-worked and seldom rich. 

I have a very strong feeling that anything that professes 
to be a funeral rite, but is carried out in the absence of the 
remains in some form or other, ceases to be a funeral rite, 
and inevitably becomes either a criticism or an eulogium of 
the deceased. I have myself been called upon to speak on 
the death of persons both public and private on not a few 
occasions, and I have also been called on to conduct a funeral 
ceremony over the coffined remains both at interment and at 
cremation. And I am sensible how widely different is the 
state of mind of the speaker and the whole tone of the cere- 
mony, when the body lies in presence of the community, and 
when it is absent and already interred. The first is truly a 
funeral rite; the second is too often a memorial discourse. 
The former is a religious ceremony ; it is difficult to prevent 
the latter being more than a literary criticism. Here, then, 



164 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

is a very serious dilemma that confronts all non-Christian 
communities. The present state of the law and of public 
opinion prevents them from carrying out their own ceremony 
in church burial-grounds, unless with "maimed rites," and 
under very narrow limits. The practical difficulties of carry- 
ing the remains across the unwieldy areas of modern cities 
are very serious. And yet a commemoration of the deceased 
in complete absence of the remains becomes a more or less 
critical discourse about the good or bad qualities of the dead 
person. It is in danger of becoming an idle and not very 
candid eulogy, or else a cold and not very sympathetic criti- 
cism. To the outside public it risks sounding untrue ; to the 
intimate friends it risks sounding unkind. 

Now, here, I believe a way out of the dilemma may be 
found in the growing practice of Cremation. I have often 
urged the adoption of this most ancient and natural of all 
modes of disposing of the dead. To non-Christians it offers 
peculiar opportunities. It is obviously the only way in which 
men can dispose of the corpse with absolute security to the 
health of the living. And the Religion of Humanity has at 
its base the religious obligation of physical health, and pro- 
tests against the morbid follies of theological uncleanness and 
pollution. In the next place, with the enormous development 
of our overgrown cities, Cremation offers the only mode in 
which for most of us the sacred remains of those we love and 
honour can be retained in any reasonable proximity for access 
and visible devotion. 

It is all very well for a solitary member of a family to con- 
trive a burying-place within reach of his own actual residence. 
Alas ! in the practical conditions of modern life we are fre- 
quently changing our residence, and our children are con- 
stantly obliged to separate from their old home and are 
scattered across a huge area. There are no permanent homes, 



CREMATION 165 

no fixed localities in modern life, and the attempt to make 
a permanent family grave is as impracticable for most of 
us as to make a permanent family home. Lastly, the pres- 
ence of the remains is an essential part of any true funeral 
rite. And this condition is often a practical impossibility to 
a non-Christian rite of a complete kind. Here Cremation 
offers us a practicable alternative. 

Burial, unless under very special and costly provisions, 
necessitates the funeral ceremony within a few days of death, 
with all the difficulties of burial arrangements and fatiguing 
calls on the family and friends. With resort to Cremation, 
the congregational gathering and so-called public ceremony 
may well be delayed for weeks. I would very much prefer 
that any funeral rite should be held in presence of the actual 
corpse, and that this rite should be single and accomplished 
once for all. The Crematorium, with its quiet ground and 
decorous chapel, offers every facility for a religious rite that 
any church possesses, without any distinctive sectarian em- 
blem or character. But there are many cases in which the 
committal of the body to the furnace and the public con- 
secration of the ashes in their urn may be separated in time, 
in place, and in form. It may be convenient to make the act 
of Cremation an immediate, simple, and even purely domestic 
task. All the details and requirements for this have been 
carefully formulated by the Cremation Society, to which its 
President, the great surgeon Sir Henry Thompson, gave so 
much labour. 

The papers and instructions prepared under his eye ex- 
plain the vast social importance and the indispensable con- 
ditions of proper Cremation. When the ashes have been 
collected and placed in the cinerary Urn, we have the corporal 
remains of the dead one more truly before us, and far more 
sympathetically present to our minds, than if the putrescent 



l66 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

body were lying distorted in its narrow case. There is 
neither difficulty nor cost in removing this Urn from place 
to place, nor in consigning it ultimately to some accessible 
place of repose. It is forgotten that the cremated ashes in 
their urn can be dealt with exactly as the corpse is in burial. 
It may be placed in a churchyard, or cemetery, or church, 
or cloister, or in any public resting-place, with or without 
a solid monument, without danger to any one, and without 
inconvenience or cost, and happily without the indescribable 
horrors of the lead coffin and the brick vault. We are told 
that a recent burial in the Abbey was the interment not of 
the body, but of the cremated ashes. Cremation is simply 
a scientific method of preparing a corpse for entombment — 
without the foolish elaboration of embalming, or the ghastly 
absurdities of high-class interment. All that we associate 
with burial, the venerable churchyard, or the church itself, 
the Campo Santo, or the "Old Yew" of the poet, are just as 
possible after Cremation as after interment. 

To non-Christians the practice of Cremation offers a solu- 
tion of the funeral dilemma, where it is practically impossible 
to arrange a funeral ceremony over the corpse itself in the 
coffin. If this be held in presence of the ashes in their Urn, 
there is time for any arrangement which may be desired, the 
remains can be brought to any spot where the ceremony is 
held without trouble or cost, and the scientific Religion of 
Humanity will give a new proof of its power to reconcile sci- 
ence with reverence, to bind the living to the dead, and to have 
equal thought of the Past and of the Future of mankind. 



XI 



CENTENARIES 

This is an age of Commemorations of the great men of the 
Past. It is true that there are always weak souls who are 
ready to go off into false enthusiasms for doubtful and very 
minor heroes. And there are always busybodies and ad- 
venturers eager to snatch at any occasion for advertising 
themselves and running some purely local demonstration. 
So there are in things of Religion, Patriotism, Loyalty, Phi- 
lanthropy, Science, or Art. Indeed in most good things, 
and in most right practices, there are bores and hypocrites 
who have their own objects in beating the gong outside their 
own booth, and seeking to flog up the public into enthusiasm 
of a paying sort. But that a good thing, an obvious duty, 
may be abused, is no good reason for dropping it, and for 
neglecting a real obligation. And it would be absurd to 
contend that honour is not a bounden duty towards those 
from whom all we enjoy in modern life has come down to 
us, or that there is not great moral use in recalling these high 
examples and memorable types of a great life. It is simply 
history teaching men morality and social duty. 

There is all the more reason therefore to insist on sub- 
stantial titles to our reverence before we accept any suggested 
commemoration; to be careful that none such degenerate 
into affectation, or be perverted to private ends. There are, 
of course, the mean and cynical tempers which are so fearful 
of being caught by sentiment or imposition that they look 
with suspicion on any idea of commemorating any great 

167 



1 68 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

man, just as they abstain on principle from subscribing to 
a charity or a Presentation. These people, who will not go 
to church for fear they may be asked to contribute to the 
plate, must be left to their own consciences. But the fact 
that foolish admiration, local ambition, and vulgar touting 
are only too common in this world, makes it a duty for 
reasonable men to ask for solid guarantees before they 
commit themselves to any suggested commemoration. To 
all for whom these occasions are bound up with religion and 
philosophy, it is all-important to see that those whom we 
honour are worthy of honour, and that the honour we pay 
them is given with a grateful heart and sincere conviction. 

The Church in its great day insisted on these guarantees 
with a very firm hand and much wisdom. Before any one 
was canonised, he or she had to be accepted by authorised 
sentence, and this could only be pronounced after long and 
thorough examination. The Church always set itself against 
any indiscriminate manufacture of Saints, and in its best 
day was able to suppress any attempt at irregular or dis- 
honest consecration. The offence of the Church was not 
so much in its liberality of canonisation, as that it recognised 
only one kind of merit, and that too often of a morbid kind. 
But in its systematic efforts to prevent posthumous honours 
being given without examination or on fraudulent grounds, 
it showed all the moral insight and practical wisdom which 
kept it for several centuries a great civilising force. 

The world now is not willing to refer these questions to 
Popes and Cardinals, who have long abused the creduhty 
of grateful men ; and it is justly indignant that Januarius and 
Teresa should be saints, whilst Alfred and Jeanne d'Arc are 
not. But though the Church, even in its best days, neglected 
nine-tenths of human merit, and made not a few scandalous 
blunders, and in its worst days has tended to make any 



CENTENARIES 1 69 

"canonisation" whatever a byword, we may still learn from 
it the essential conditions of any right honouring of the 
mighty Dead — viz. that such honour be honest, enlightened, 
and general, and that those we seek to honour are worthy 
of remembrance from generation to generation. 

This was the essential idea of the "Calendar" of great 
men and women, drawn up by Auguste Comte fifty years ago 
with the view of impressing on the minds of the present age 
a table of their chief benefactors in all forms of human power 
and virtue. It was not intended to be definitive and perpetual ; 
much less was it intended to be exclusive or negative. It 
has drawn forth warm admiration from J. Stuart Mill, and 
has served to systematise the judgments of many philosophers 
and historians who are sometimes shy in acknowledging their 
real debt to this great synthetic and concrete tableau of 
human evolution in the sum. At any rate, no other general 
scheme of classification of the world's greatest "worthies" 
has ever been suggested; and the pedantry of speciaHsm 
contents itself, as usual, with academic sneering at particular 
names. We never pretend that Comte's 558 heroes and 
heroines bind the future to honour every one of these, much 
less to honour no others. But it affords men, whether they 
accept Comte's philosophy or not, an admirable type of the 
kind of power and of virtue which should be held for ever in 
public memory as benefactors of our race. 

The more I study it the more I am amazed at the genius 
with which Comte formed so great a series of personal judg- 
ments about so vast a variety of achievements and capacities, 
when we consider his own limited study of special science. 
As Laffitte told me, when I was wondering how Comte had 
gained his insight into the spirit of ^Eschylus, loiowing nothing 
of the tragedies but a bald French prose translation — "these 
things are possible to genius." Without asserting that all 



170 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Comte's judgments are just, much less that they bind the 
future (indeed, he only put it out for the nineteenth century), 
the scheme in general conception forms a firm and suggestive 
type. 

The idea of connecting a great name with each day of the 
year was of course borrowed from the Catholic Calendar; 
and the device of adding "subordinates" to many names 
for leap years enabled Comte to compose a general list of 
five or six hundred names in graduated scales of four orders. 
No doubt there are five or six hundred thousand of men and 
women worthy of our regard, but the human memory and 
the human faculty of enthusiasm could hardly be stretched 
so far. One (and occasionally two) names for each day of 
the week is an ample and reasonable limit. Now, whether 
or not we accept Comte's scheme of worthies, it is a useful 
guide to bear in mind, that a few hundred names of great 
men in the past is quite as many as the average man and 
woman is at all likely to know anything about, and the first 
question arises on any proposed commemoration. Could it 
possibly belong to any such list, or could it conceivably be 
compared with the great names in such a list? 

Comte's Calendar of great men, certainly, has reference 
to the whole sphere of human history in all its forms, and is 
designed for the use of Europeans in general. It need not 
exclude national and even local commemorations in different 
countries or districts of those to whom each people or any 
province owe grateful memory. But, even in such purely 
local commemorations, regard should be had to the wider 
spheres. It would be mischievous to crowd out the memory 
of the Alfreds, Cromwells, Shakespeares, and Miltons with 
a wearisome excess of minor statesmen and poets. In these 
days when every active mayor or alderman expects to be 
presented with his portrait (even though he have to pay for it 



CENTENARIES 171 

himself), and when every country town is looldng out for 
the birthplace or the tombstone of some poet or soldier whose 
name has lived for a hundred years, it is well to remind our- 
selves that too great prodigaHty of minor celebrations must 
end by blunting our interest in those which are a solemn 
duty and a natural education in themselves. 

The year 1899 afforded a crucial example of this truth. 
It was the eve of the thousandth anniversary of the death 
of Alfred the Great; the three-hundredth anniversary of the 
birth of Cromwell, and of the death of Spenser; and the 
hundredth anniversary of the death of George Washington. 
For three of these, at any rate, great efforts were made to 
impress on the imagination of the pubhc all that the world 
owes to these great creative statesmen. Beside the immortal 
memories of Alfred, of Cromwell, of Washington, the names 
of minor poets and politicians fade out of the sky, like the 
lesser stars in full moonlight. If our commemoration of great 
men is to be a serious and instructive thing, it is all important 
to keep in view relative merit and due proportion of contri- 
bution to the progress of mankind. To pay fit honour to 
three such men as Alfred, Cromwell, and Washington, taxed 
the enthusiasm of the English-speaking race for one year 
at least. And till we see our way to carry out such celebra- 
tions worthily, we need not burden ourselves with any lesser 
national heroes. Little Pedlington and Great Mudborough 
may raise a bust, or deliver orations, for any worthy citizen 
of their own they may happen to discover; but they should 
not ask the public to take part in what is in no sense a national 
possession. 

The commemorations of Alfred, of Cromwell, of Washing- 
ton, supply us with excellent lessons of the great educational 
value that such occasions develop. More has been done 
recently to teach Englishmen all that they owe to King 



172 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Alfred than perhaps was done in the thousand years since 
his death. Here was a ruler to whom England, as a social 
and national unit, as the land of one special type of soldier 
and citizen, owed more than to any other single ruler in its 
entire history; in the fundamental basis of national life and 
character owed more than to the Conqueror, to Edward I,, 
to Elizabeth, or to Cromwell. He was a man also, who by 
virtue of his saintly candour of soul, and his literary activity, 
has enabled us to know him and to know his aims better than 
we know the aims and the soul of Julius Csesar or of Charle- 
magne. Yet the ignorance in the general public of the 
achievements and aspirations of Alfred was strange ; and men 
calling themselves men of letters were not ashamed to declare 
that they knew nothing of Alfred except that he burnt the 
goodwife's cakes. It is to be hoped that something has been 
done to enable the English people to know more, and to 
understand better, the greatest, noblest, most perfect of 
English heroes. 

In the same way, much was done in 1899 to stamp on the 
public mind the true story of Oliver and the great services 
he rendered to our nation. Scores of books, addresses, 
articles, and other memorials have been put forth on the 
occasion of his Tercentenary; and more has been done to 
teach the truth about him than in all the years since Carlyle's 
memorable work appeared. London, which long has had 
statues of James II., some Duke of Bedford, Disraeli, and 
half-a-dozen Indian soldiers, but no statue to the greatest 
citizen England ever bred, has at last an adequate memorial. 
Enghsh history has taken a firmer hold in the pubhc mind, 
now that the infamous blackening of Cromwell's memory is 
being adequately redressed. And as to George Washington, 
though his memory concerns in the main the people of the 
United States, it is obvious that the sympathy of the English 



CENTENARIES 1 73 

public joins with the honours which the American public 
pays to one of the noblest examples of soldier and statesman 
that our race can boast. 

There is one condition which ought to be observed in all 
serious commemorations — to recognise anniversaries of the 
death, not of the birth of great men. To observe both is 
needlessly to double the occasions, and to introduce essen- 
tially false ideas. The birth of any great man is not a 
national event, is not an epoch at all, is, in no sense, a great 
crisis in history. It is the close of a great career which 
alone is marked by contemporaries, which alone concerns 
the world, and which only history need record. Days of 
birth are private, domestic, or theological festivals. Families 
may observe the birthdays of their children, or Christians 
may celebrate the purely fanciful date when God was in- 
carnate in the Virgin's womb. But for practical and human 
affairs, it is the end of life which determines its place in the 
social world, and such remembrance as it may be worthy to 
maintain. For all national purposes it is right that we 
reserve our commemoration for the days of our heroes' 
death; and that we leave it to theologians and heralds to 
commemorate the birthdays of such as may be supposed to 
have an interest miraculous or genealogical. 

Another useful condition would be to recognise only 
centenaries and not lesser anniversaries — at any rate, ex- 
cepting in some very special case. A century, of course, is 
a purely arbitrary period; but so are weeks, and months, 
and jubilees, and most of our periodical measures. But it is 
a convenient term. If the memory of any man has lasted 
fresh, and has gained in force after a hundred years from 
his death, there is a fair presumption that his fame is real 
and his services to the public worthy of honour. The cen- 
tenary of a birth is nothing. Each centenary in succession 



174 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

marks a more definite title to permanent honour. The late 
Senhor Garcia attended the centenary celebration of his own 
birth. When we come to Millenaries (there are superfine 
folk who grumble at the word, though millenary is a word 
quite as correct and quite as plain as centenary), they must 
always be rare indeed. And the millenary of King Alfred 
offers us a perfect type of a commemoration which is emi- 
nently deserved, due by long neglect of ages, morally elevat- 
ing to those who will observe it, and peculiarly instructive in 
teaching the best and most important part of history. 



XII 

MODERN PILGRIMAGES 

Much attention is now being bestowed on the revived 
practice of organised visits to historic scenes; and several 
educational bodies have lately been arranging such collec- 
tive acts of commemoration and study. Pilgrimages proper 
(apart from those of Catholic pilgrims) have long been a 
special feature in the practice of Positivist bodies. 

A Pilgrimage with Positivists is always a real commemora- 
tion of some worthy servant of Humanity, and its main pur- 
pose is to deepen the sense of reverence, and widen our 
understanding of the services of some great life. It is truly 
a religious act, and it is also an educational instrument. It 
is therefore essentially "a service" in itself; it almost neces- 
sarily implies an address or discourse to give point to the 
feelings of veneration, and to develop and illustrate the his- 
torical lessons enforced. As the Catholic Pilgrim keeps as 
a festival St. Paul's day or St. Lawrence's day, and visits 
the tombs or the footprints of martyrs and apostles, so the 
Positivist visits at Stratford the birthplace and grave of 
Shakespeare, and listens to the story of his life, and chants 
the songs he loved. The feeling is really the same. And, 
if in the Positivist Pilgrimage there are no sackcloth and 
ashes, no penitential psalms, no genuflexions or osculations, 
but, on the contrary, frank enjoyment of beautiful scenes 
and joyous gathering in a friendly meeting — the difference 
is due to the far wider and more human form that religion 
takes in the Positivist scheme than in any superhuman and 

175 



176 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

theological religion. It is obvious that, with the infinite roll 
of Humanity before us, a Positivist Pilgrimage is a thing far 
more broad, sociable, instructive, and joyous than it can be 
to any votary of a celestial world. 

Positivist Pilgrimages began in France almost from the 
time of Comte's death. Indeed he himself instituted his 
own solitary weekly pilgrimage to the grave of his beloved 
friend. From the day of Comte's death in 1857 until now, 
his followers have been wont to make genuine pilgrimage to 
his grave, and now to that of his principal colleagues; and 
this takes systematic form on the 5th September, the anni- 
versary of his death. M. Laffitte soon began to organise 
historical Pilgrimages to the birthplace, residence, or tomb 
of some great name in thought or action, in and near Paris. 
And our Newton Hall body may claim to have developed 
the practice in an even more systematic manner. 

For many years we have now carried on a series of Pil- 
grimages having a double object — the commemoration of 
great men, and the giving a vivid interest in history. On 
each visit, a discourse is given by some selected speaker on 
the life, work, character, and services of some chosen hero, 
over whose bones we are standing, or within sight of his 
birthplace or home. Such an address is a combination of 
sermon, biography, and historical lecture, and it lends itself 
to every mode of religious reverence and of practical study. 
It is surprising how well the Positivist scheme contributes 
to this large treatment. Sometimes we visit a church, an 
abbey, a palace, a ruin, a site, it may be a gallery of antiq- 
uities or of pictures. Sometimes the commemoration takes 
a musical or even a dramatic form, sometimes a pictorial or 
antiquarian aspect. But the essence of it is always reverent 
commemoration of a great benefactor of mankind, plus 
systematic study of his life and character. 



MODERN PILGRIMAGES 177 

The list of those whose work we have studied on the 
sacred spots covered by their memory, or wherein their 
bones are laid, is curiously long. It comprises Alfred, 
Cromw^ell, Milton, Bacon, Harvey, William III., Penn, 
Shakespeare, Fox, Bunyan, De Foe, Newton, Locke, Gold- 
smith, Harrison, Halley, Darwin, and many others. The 
longer journeys were to Stratford-on-Avon, to Paris, to Ox- 
ford, Cambridge, Ely, Canterbury, Winchester, Salisbury, 
some of these visits extending over several days. Frequent 
visits were also made to the Abbey, the Tower, the Temple, 
the British Museum, the National Gallery, the South Ken- 
sington Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Natural 
History Museum, Dulwich College, and the Museum of the 
College of Surgeons. At each of these, some great name or 
names in philosophy, art, science, or politics, were chosen 
for commemoration, and a lecture given in sight of their 
works or in presence of their relics. 

I cannot pretend to be more impressionable than my 
neighbours; but I confess that I have felt a fresh glow of 
gratitude and admiration for the mighty dead, when under 
the trees at Horton, where Milton's early life was passed, 
we read Comus in parts ; when at Stratford we listened to the 
fine discourse of Mr. Vernon Lushington, stood over the 
poet's grave, joined in the service of his parish church, heard 
the songs from his plays by Anne Hathaway's cottage or 
under the woods of Charlcote; when at Winchester we 
followed up the footprints of Alfred, and spoke of his perfect 
life; when at Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury, or in Paris, 
we visited spots consecrated by the memory of a long series 
of great men; when in our annual visit to Westminster 
Abbey, we speak of the dead whose bones lie there, or whose 
deeds are associated with its records and monuments. These 
visits are real Pilgrimages — true acts of religious com- 

N 



178 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

memoration, quite as sincere and heartfelt as the Pilgrimages 
to Rome and Lourdes. 

It may be that we have no need of mourning dress, or 
rosaries, groans, tears, and misereres. We certainly enjoy 
the holiday, the lovely groves and gardens, the Cathedrals, 
the palaces, the galleries we visit with frank and unre- 
strained delight in beautiful things as such. But a human 
Religion combines all this, as Greeks and Orientals have 
ever done, along with genuine reverence; and we add a 
scientific interest in serious history. Our Pilgrimages have 
always been planned on a thoroughly popular and simple 
basis. Upwards of eighty persons went to Stratford; and 
some of the London visits have comprised even more. Men, 
women, and children have joined; and persons of all pro- 
fessions, from judges and professors to tailors and seamstresses. 

I have nothing but good-will for a holiday trip of any 
kind, even if it be only Harry and Harriet on donkeys at 
Hampstead Heath, or "the missus and the baby" on a 
Gravesend steamboat ; and I frankly admit that a crowded 
third-class carriage on August Bank Holiday is apt to be 
hot, and the temperance inn at a market-town is apt to get 
stuffy. But a random holiday trip, a mere excursion "to 
spend a happy day," cannot be made into a Pilgrimage, nor 
be worthy of the serious efforts of cultivated men and women 
— unless it has some definite motive as its inspiration behind 
it, which our Newton Hall Pilgrimages have always. A 
visit to the British Museum, to Hampton Court, or even to 
Florence, is a very good and pleasant thing, if it be well 
conducted and planned ; and much may be learned from it, 
if it be led by competent guides. But a Cook's Tour, even 
if personally conducted by M.A.'s, M.P.'s, and Professors, 
will remain a Tour, and cannot be properly described as a 
Pilgrimage. It is a very good thing, and by all means 



MODERN PILGRIMAGES 1 79 

should be encouraged. But romping — if not horse-play 
and beer — will press it close, and a holiday jaunt it will 
remain, with a tendency to the Bean-feast rather than the 
lecture. The belief and the practice of the Religion of Hu- 
manity alone can make a true and serious modern Pilgrimage. 
Not a word that I have written has any kind of aim to 
discourage holiday tours of any sort; and the more of his- 
tory, of biography, and of art that can be put into a holiday 
tour the better. But how vastly must the best holiday tour 
remain inferior, both as inspiration and as education, to 
a Greek gathering at Olympia, Delphi, or Eleusis; to a 
mediaeval pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Rome, Assisi, or Canter- 
bury; to a Musulman pilgrimage to Mecca; or a Hindoo 
pilgrimage to Benares. But all this and more is realised in 
a Positivist pilgrimage to Winchester or to Stratford, where 
still sleep the two greatest of Englishmen, in the spots where 
a large part of their lives were passed. Positivism in this, 
as in other things, comes back to this truth — that all great 
things require as their inspiration some genuine religious 
idea — and that the truly religious idea is based on reverence 
for Humanity and all her worthy servants. 



XIII 

THE USE OF SUNDAY 

The successful institution of "Museum Sunday" offers a 
good example of the way in which the more enlightened 
spirits of various religious bodies are finding a common 
ground ; and on that common ground Positivists are always 
ready to meet them and to work with them. The object of 
the Sunday Society is not to weaken, much less to abolish, 
the institution of Sunday, but to restore its use "as a benefi- 
cent social institution." And with that aim Positivists most 
entirely concur, meaning to make Sunday, as it was from 
antiquity, a spiritual and religious festival. 

The history of Sunday and of the Week is singularly in- 
teresting, and of no small extent and complexity. A great 
amount of learning has been expended upon both, and many 
things are still doubtful and obscure. One set of teachers 
finds an astronomical origin in the Week; another traces it 
to the Astrolatry of the Asiatic plains; and others give it a 
purely Scriptural source. According to Comte, the Week 
may be traced back to quite primitive times, and has a very 
general source, essentially based in natural tendencies of the 
human mind itself. That is to say, in his technical language, 
the Week is a subjective institution, and a seventh day of 
rest is a spontaneous conception of natural religion. 

There is no need here to dilate on what Comte has said 
as to the purely subjective values of the prime numbers and 
of seven — that is to say, their reaction on the elementary 
powers of the mind apart from any external observations or 

i8o 



THE USE OF SUNDAY l8l 

concrete applications. He declares that the week of seven 
days was an institution to which there was a general tendency 
long anterior to observations of the planets and to settled 
theocracies. Abstractly considered, the number seven repre- 
sents the sum of the first three numbers plus a copula, or 
rest. It also consists of three pairs, or of two triads, each 
followed by a seventh unit. Comte declares that brutes 
seem to have a sense of three, and so do the lowest savages, 
not being able to go beyond this number without mechanical 
aids; and thus, that i, 2, 3, are conceptions which all minds 
can grasp apart from observations and without the help of 
signs. Man, he says, has an instinctive sense of distinctions 
up to three : higher numeration is the result of effort, reflec- 
tion, and teaching. Hence the lowest mind can become 
used to ideas of three pairs, or two triads, followed by a 
synthesis or rest ; but it is liable to be confused, or to need 
artificial aid, if the enumeration is carried further. 

We know by experience how naturally the most careless 
or the most ignorant can instinctively retain the sense of the 
beginning, middle, and end of the week ; how easily they can 
remember a recurrence of every second day three times over, 
and even one of every third day twice, when followed by a 
pause to distinguish one set of groups from another. If we 
advance to four or five alternations, or to three or four 
triads, it involves an effort of thought and reference to a 
calendar, of which the lowest intelligences are incapable. 
The great rival of the Week is the Decade. But the Decade 
is a period too long for the most ignorant masses; they 
could not remember when was its middle or its end. Take 
a day of rest off the Decade, then the working week of nine 
days could be divided into three triads — which is too much 
— but not into pairs at all. The Decade may be divided 
into pairs or alternations, but not into triads at all. The 



l82 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

working week of six days will divide into pairs and into 
triads, and it is closed by a ^^ synthesis" — a pause — a day 
of rest. The simple groups, the simplest of all groups, 
pairs and triads, are universally useful, instinctively remem- 
bered, and conceivable by the lowest and rudest intelligence. 
Such is the subjective origin of the Week of seven days. 

An immense deal of learning has been expended in trac- 
ing the origin of the Week to the Planets, to the phases of 
the Moon, and to the six days of Creation. Unquestion- 
ably, the seven days of the Week were, from very ancient 
times and over vast periods of time, associated with the five 
great planets known of old plus the Sun and the Moon, and 
they still bear the planetary names. The phases of the 
Moon have a certain correspondence with the Weeks; and 
undoubtedly the Jewish ordinances and the Jewish Scrip- 
tures have been the most powerful agencies in stereotyping 
the institution of the Week. It seems quite certain that the 
six days of Creation were derived in Scriptural story from 
the six working days of the Week; and not the Week from 
the Cosmogony. The correspondence of the Week and the 
phases of the Moon is far from exact ; and the Week existed 
as an institution apart from planetary observations. The 
truth would seem to be that the Week was a subjective 
creation of the human mind dealing with the simplest proper- 
ties of the earliest numbers. But this spontaneous institu- 
tion was immensely strengthened — first : by its association 
with religious observances of New Moons and Full Moons; 
much later by association with what were called the Seven 
Planets; and the historical efficiency and social observance 
of the Week has been immensely stimulated and fortified by 
the Hebrew Scriptures. 

If the Week had a planetary origin, why was it not instituted 
by the Egyptians who had far greater astronomical interests 



THE USE OF SUNDAY 1 83 

than the Jews? The Egyptians divided their month by 
decades, as did the Greeks. But then the Egyptians paid 
religious observance to New Moons and Full Moons which 
involve periods of about a fortnight. To divide this period 
was to establish the Week. The Roman Calendar, which 
was (no doubt purposely) kept irregular and complicated, 
had certain approximations to periods of seven and fourteen 
days; and these were possibly quite spontaneous. In four 
months of the Roman year the Nones fell on the seventh 
day. In the same months, the Ides (i.e. the Dividers) fell 
on the fifteenth day. In the other eight months of the year, 
the Ides fell on the thirteenth day. And throughout the 
Roman Year there were always seven clear days between 
the Nones and the Ides. The profoundly basic institution 
of the Week has been formed and built up by a combination 
of forces. Originating in the instinctive powers of the 
human mind, it was strengthened by astrology, developed 
by scientific astronomy, and consecrated by Holy Writ and 
the halo of Divine Institution. The history of its long 
struggle with the Decade and its ultimate triumph over it 
in the Roman world, the history of its easy victory over the 
Decade at the French Revolution, form instructive chapters 
in Social Statics, and also in the part played by popular 
instinct in the course of Social Dynamics. 

The history of Sunday is hardly less instructive than that 
of the Week. This beautiful institution was originally a 
real day of rest, a festival, a day of joy and thanksgiving and 
of spiritual exultation. Twice in the course of centuries it 
has been perverted by Scribes and Pharisees. There is every 
reason to believe the Sabbath to have been a Mosaic institu- 
tion ; but none to prove that the Sabbath of the later rabbis 
was instituted by Moses. In the view of Kuenen and other 
authorities, the Fourth Commandment, as we have it, is not 



184 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

in its original form. It has been tampered with and ampli- 
fied. The Mosaic law instituted a weekly day of rest, a 
religious festival ; and so it probably continued for centuries 
down to the return from exile, when Judaism received a 
sacerdotal character, and the Jews became a sect instead of a 
nation. 

The Sabbatical restrictions were made constantly more 
stringent and mechanical down to the time when Jesus and 
Paul repudiated the rabbinical Sabbath. In the second cen- 
tury of our era, ''Sabbatisers" were those who adhered to 
the old superstition, and the "Lord's Day," the following 
day, was made the Christian festival. This certainly did 
not take the place of the Sabbath. It was a new festival 
rivalling and superseding, but not reviving, the Mosaic institu- 
tion. Both days were observed by some scrupulous Chris- 
tians for several ages. Under the first Christian Emperor 
in the fourth century, we have the legal establishment of 
Sunday as a rehgious festival. In the Code we have a con- 
stitution of Constantine (321 a.d.) ordering the observance 
of Sunday — venerabili die Solis — not by mechanical absten- 
tions, but by rest from labour. He says, that in all courts 
of law and public offices it shall be kept as a holiday; and 
in the 12th title of Book iii. of Justinian's Code we have a 
series of imperial ordinances, ending in closing the theatres 
on the "Lord's Day." In the Western Church, during the 
Mediaeval period, Sunday remained a day of rest, a religious 
festival : not a fast, and anything but a Jewish Sabbath. 

This was broken by Calvinism, which for some three cen- 
turies has oppressed large parts of Protestant Christendom. 
Calvin in his Institutes, dealing with the Fourth Command- 
ment (Inst. ii. 8, 28), says: "The end of this command- 
ment is that we, being dead to our own affections and works, 
should be busied in meditation of the kingdom of God." 



THE USE OF SUNDAY 1 85 

But he does not seem to lay down any special rules of Sab- 
batical observance. He says indeed that the Fourth Com- 
mandment "hath a peculiar and several consideration from 
the rest." As a profound student of the Bible, Calvin, no 
doubt, detected that apocryphal element in our decalogue 
which modern orientalists have found in this command- 
ment. But the "Sabbath" of the Puritans and Covenanters 
is the result of later glosses upon Calvin, just as the Sabbath 
of the post-exilic rabbis was a sectarian gloss upon the Ten 
Words of Moses. Thus the Pharisaical "Sabbath," that is 
still servilely worshipped by some Bible Christians in Eng- 
land, in Scotland, in parts of Northern Europe, in America 
of the North-East, is not even of Mosaic origin. It is not 
truly Jewish; it is a corruption of Judaism, just as image- 
worship has been a corruption of Christianity. It is a super- 
stitious invention of the decadence of Judaism, of the de- 
cadence of Christianity. 

It is not Christian; it is certainly not Catholic; it has 
not been practised by the bulk of Christians nor in the great 
ages of Christendom. It has been accepted only by certain 
groups of Christian dogmatists for a small part of the Chris- 
tian era in certain portions of the Christian world. This 
perversion of Judaism, this revolt from Christianity, this 
corruption of Protestantism, is really a reversion to the me- 
chanical superstition of Polynesian savages, which they call 
Taboo. Taboo is that which is marked off, and so conse- 
crated or forbidden. Amongst all primitive races this taboo, 
or superstitious separation or dedication, exists; and at last 
it crystallises always into inane and degrading formalities. 
It has often been remarked that the rabbinical Sabbath was 
evolved out of a barbarous form of taboo, of which it is a 
degraded survival. What is often called the "Christian 
Sabbath" would be more properly named the "Protestant 



1 86 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Taboo.'' The idea that an Omnipotent Creator and a 
Saviour of Mankind can take delight in seeing men, women, 
and children pass twenty-four hours in dismal inertia (for 
flesh and blood cannot endure more than a few hours of 
"spiritual exercises") — that they could be offended by hu- 
man beings enjoying any beautiful thing — is an amazing 
instance of the survival of barbarous customs amongst 
civilised people. 

But we, who repudiate the Taboo conception of a Sabbath 
Day, are those who most earnestly desire to restore Sunday 
as a religious festival and to keep it as a day of rest. We 
are as much opposed, as the most devout Jewish or con- 
scientious Sabbatarian can be, to make Sunday only another 
Monday, or day of ordinary work. We are equally opposed 
to make it another Saturday, a mere holiday, like the statu- 
tory holidays of the year. For us, Sunday should be, what 
since its institution some three thousand years ago, it has 
usually been, a day of rest, of religious festival, a day for the 
true culture of the mind and the spirit, for congregational 
communion in all that is good, pure, and inspiring — a day 
for educating all that is best in our personal, our domestic, 
our social life. 



XIV 

THE VETO ON DRINK 

I PROPOSE to say a few words upon a single definite point 
in a very broad and complicated question, and to express 
my own personal view without attempting to dogmatise for 
others. I desire to assert a principle and not to discuss any 
special agitation or Bill, much less to argue the drink trade 
on party grounds; and I shall purposely put aside subordi- 
nate practical questions arising out of temporary and local 
conditions. The social obligations that group round the 
Religion of Humanity are not local, nor are they national; 
and they are independent of climate, race, and the habits of 
each local society. I wish to deal with one supreme moral 
and social principle which should govern all that we do and 
say in practical legislation. 

That principle is, that the enforcement of a moral practice 
by legal coercion upon the vote of any majority whatever, is 
of the essence of tyranny and has in it all the evil of religious 
persecution. It is an attempt to effect by force and law a 
moral and social reform which can only be healthily pro- 
moted by moral and spiritual agencies. It involves that 
abandonment of moral effort for material penalties which is 
one of the most fatal tendencies of our age, a tendency 
which brutalises government whilst it discredits religion. 
The great triumph of Christianity, as Comte has shown 
more powerfully than any preacher of the Gospel, was to 
separate the sphere of moral and spiritual influence from 
the iron grip of the judge and the policeman. Positivism is, 

187 



1 88 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

in its essence, a revival of the eternal problem, how to found 
a spiritual power apart from any material power. And on 
that ground it has steadfastly opposed all State religions, 
all compulsory orthodoxy, all enforced education, all morality 
by Act of Parliament, and virtue appraised by the civil 
magistrate. It is for teachers, preachers, and philanthropists 
to make men sober, chaste, temperate, unselfish and indus- 
trious. It is for the magistrate and police to punish dis- 
order, crime, all forms of recognised offences and personal 
injuries, material, civil, or moral. On this ground, which 
is the foundation of civil and religious government, it is 
tyranny to penalise habits which masses of good and wise 
men regard as innocent and even salutary. For my part, I 
look on any ulterior aim of abolishing alcohol by statute as 
an insidious form of spiritual tyranny. 

Though the venom of fanaticism is not to be diverted by 
any proviso or disclaimer, I wish to make it clear that I am 
not suggesting a word against stringent regulations of the 
public sale of alcohol, and of all public places where it is 
served; nor against any penalties on public intoxication, or 
on acts committed under the influence of drink, or on incite- 
ment and connivance to drunkenness. It is a practical ques- 
tion for which much may be urged, whether great reforms 
in law and administration are not still needed. It may be 
desirable to strengthen the law making intoxication in pub- 
lic a crime. Intoxication in public stands on the same 
footing as a pubhc act of indecency, or the public use of a 
dangerous beast. To encourage or to allow drunkenness in 
any public resort may fairly be made a serious crime in those 
responsible for its good conduct. And if the tavern-keeper 
is the mere agent of the drink merchant, it may be a further 
duty to send the drink merchant himself to prison, when 
duly affected with legal notice of his agent's offence. It may 



THE VETO ON DRINK 1 89 

be high time to deprive the magistracy of powers which they 
have sometimes abused in the interest of brewers, as they 
have in the interest of game-preservers and many powerful 
persons and corporations. 

But all these matters of public police stand on a different 
footing from the suppression of the use of alcohol, of the 
traffic in alcohol, of the public retailing of alcohol — apart 
from any overt act of intoxication, any public disorder or 
personal injury due to it as a direct and visible consequence. 
And, now that a heated and ignorant fanaticism is claiming 
this power as its lawful due in the name of social morality 
and well-being, it becomes a civic duty to take up an uncom- 
promising position against it. This is the more incumbent 
on free and independent citizens because public men and 
what are so comically styled "responsible" statesmen, in the 
race of democratic competition, are selling themselves to any 
organised body of voters. No goodness in motive, no zeal 
in philanthropy or piety, no picture of the horrors of alco- 
hoHsm, no statistics of national loss and misery, no accumu- 
lation of pseudo-scientific authority, should blind us to the 
monstrous wrongfulness of any attempt to suppress alcohol 
by law. It is in any form an antisocial tyranny, degrading 
alike to the cause of morality and religion. 

It matters not that many worthy men and women trace 
most of our vices or sufferings to the abuse of alcohol; it 
matters not that some hysterical men and women find evil 
in the careful use of alcohol; it matters not that in any 
particular spot they may be a majority. So long as an im- 
mense body of citizens of all orders and sorts choose to use 
alcohol, think it right to do so, and cannot be shown to 
offend their neighbours whilst doing so with moderation, it 
would be tyrannical to punish or forbid the consumption of 
any food which an orderly adult thinks it desirable and 



190 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

right to take. To deny him or her this liberty is to de- 
stroy moral responsibility, and to subject private morality to 
Spartan or Hindoo swaddling clothes. Every law that vio- 
lates conscience, by imposing either conduct or opinion re- 
jected by just and wise men, is an act of tyranny on those 
whose liberty is violated, and an act of demoralisation to 
those whose power is abused. And the social, civic, and 
religious mischiefs flowing from such tyranny far outweigh 
any immediate or special gain in moral result. 

After a struggle of fifteen centuries. Western Europe has 
almost adopted this rule in the case of enforcing religion by 
penalties. The existence of our own movement is striking 
proof how complete is the victory in England of religious 
tolerance. Now that the last embers of theological persecu- 
tion are burnt out, a fanaticism as sincere and quite as blind 
as that of any Inquisition is seeking to set up moral perse- 
cution, a Holy Office to hand over moral unorthodoxy to 
the secular arm. There are no assignable limits to the 
extravagances of this. If conscientious and moderate use 
of personal freedom is to be made penal in all, because 
abuse of that freedom by some leads to possible and indirect 
mischief, we must go back to Moses and Aaron, Lycurgus, 
and the Quakers of New England. 

A zealous body of reformers trace our national sufferings 
to the rapid increase of population. They would like to 
separate a thoro the couple whose family exceeded the 
regulation number, and enforce absolute separation on a 
second offence. The population problem is quite as serious 
as the drink problem. It would be difficult to prove that 
alcohol was the source of more crime and misery in the 
world than sex. Sexual irregularity, as such, might be 
brought, as in New England of old, within the arm of the 
law. And if the freedom of all is to be stopped at its 



THE VETO ON DRINK I9I 

source, to prevent the ulterior and possible licence of some, 
it might be made an offence for a man and a woman to 
dance, walk, or talk together. 

A zealous band of vegetarians preach that animal food is 
practically poison; and there may be an agitation to close 
the butcher's shop as well as the tavern. The national Meat 
Bill far exceeds the national Drink Bill; and many compe- 
tent authorities hold that more disease is due to excess in 
food than to excess in drink. Many parents shamefully 
abuse their parental authority. Therefore, it is argued, 
allow no father to punish a child. In very truth, if we 
once empower the magistrate to punish personal conduct 
as well as civil wrong, there is no limit to the extravagance of 
tyrannical fanaticism. 

It is certainly from no lukewarmness as to moral conduct 
that the teaching of Comte rejects the encroachment of law 
on morality. It is in the name of morality and rehgion that 
it does so. Comte himself carried the rigidity of his personal 
abstinence, there is reason to fear, to the point of injuring his 
health. He abjured not only all alcohol and tobacco, but 
even such stimulants as coffee and tea, reduced his sleep and 
exercise to the lowest measure, and his daily food to the 
simplest minimum that could sustain life. He looked for- 
ward to a time when most women and preachers would, as a 
rule, renounce alcohol for themselves. But he has said 
much more about moderation in food, both in quality and 
costliness, than he has said about abstinence from stimulants. 
And he has said more about sexual control, even within the 
strictest monogamy, than about temperance in food and 
drink. He has taught that man's appetites, passions, and 
selfish instincts are infinitely complex and subtle, and that 
it is the entire organic nature and egoism in the gross which 
has to be disciplined, and not that one single appetite is to 



192 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

be restrained by a penal asceticism, whilst the other appetites 
are suffered to run riot. 

We see daily how violent zealots for total abstinence are 
gross feeders ; and many a rich reformer in alcohol lives like 
Lucullus or Vitellius, or resorts to chemical stimulants. 
Many of them have abnormally large families, which they 
sometimes cruelly neglect. Excess in dress, in luxury, gam- 
bling, frivolity and idleness in all their forms are national 
scourges and degrading habits. But it does not follow that 
we can enforce Vegetarianism or Malthusianism by imprison- 
ment, or have sumptuary and ascetic regulations for every 
detail of hfe. It was tried in a nobly religious spirit and 
with singular moral earnestness by the Pilgrim Fathers, and 
was a disastrous failure. It proved to be social tyranny 
which tore up morality by the roots. The basis of morality 
is moral freedom, moral responsibility, and conscientious 
conviction. The Bishop was right, that it is better to be 
free than sober. Moderation in enjoyment of life is a far 
higher state than any penal abstinence. It is better to 
struggle, even feebly, against habits of self-indulgence, than 
to become a total abstainer by the rules of the prison. The 
very condition of true temperance is to reject the degrading 
temptation to appeal to force rather than reason, and to 
substitute the policeman for moral and spiritual teaching. 



XV 



CHURCH DISESTABLISHMENT 

The measure introduced by Mr. Asquith in 1894 for the 
resettlement of the foundations, now monopoHsed by the 
Church of England in Wales, was an act of justice and policy, 
conceived on true lines, and worked out with statesmanlike 
foresight. From the point of view of political principle, it 
was one of the most important reforms ever submitted to the 
legislature; for, though its scale of operation was small and 
the changes it proposed were moderate, it embodied political 
doctrines which go far and involve much. It is not proposed 
here to discuss its practical machinery, all the more that the 
House of Lords, with the official spokesmen of the favoured 
creed, at once resolved to throw out the Bill. The result of 
this just and trenchant effort to get rid of an ancient abuse 
will not be so easily disposed of. But it concerns a principle 
of society and of religion of the first importance. 

Positivists may justly claim to be the only religious society 
which, both by principle and practice, insists on the absolute 
integrity and independence of the spiritual communion. 
Other Churches claim or cry out for secular support. State 
recognition, pubHc money, and official intervention, and the 
Established Church and the Catholic Church are the most 
clamorous of all. The Church of England, true to its origin 
as the creature of the monarchy and the tool of the legisla- 
ture, clings to its legal monopoly, without regard for real 
spiritual interests; and it would to-day risk revolution and 
public calamity so long as it could preserve its own privileges. 
o 193 



194 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

The Church of England has bred many wise and saintly 
spirits, and it has had some useful and even beautiful func- 
tions through its lowest epoch of degradation; but, looked 
at historically and politically, it exhibits one of the saddest 
spectacles which has ever dishonoured Western Christendom. 
From the end of the eighteenth century and to-day, it has 
resumed the work of a true spiritual body. But from the 
Revolution of 1648 until the European Revolution of 1789, 
it was a mere liveried toady of the rich, the black police of 
the governing order ; and the long era of the Trullibers and 
the pluralists has left an indelible stain on the Establishment 
in its official aspect. 

English priests and congregations in our day, it is quite 
true, are exhibiting individually, and for many spiritual ends, 
examples as truly religious as those of any existing body. 
But a century and a half of the most sordid sycophantism 
and the coarsest self-indulgence cannot be wiped out without 
surrender of a class monopoly, State servility, and wealth 
more scandalous than that of any extant Christian commun- 
ion. Officially, the Church of England is still the creature 
of a secular legislature, the paid partisan of the political 
interests of the rich. Nothing but being relieved of its official 
privileges and its preposterous wealth can ever enable it to 
rise to the level of a pure and honest spiritual communion. 

The Catholic Church in Ireland is, owing to exceptional 
conditions, in a true and normal situation. But, even in 
England, the Catholic Church is the political and social ally of 
the rich; and its traditional policy of seeking everywhere a 
State monopoly is so inveterate that, even here, it supports the 
principle of an established Church. The Nonconformists are 
naturally jealous of a State Church, and bitterly resent the 
privileges and endowments reserved for a single sect which 
neither by its numbers nor its works has any claim to predomi- 



CHURCH DISESTABLISHMENT 1 95 

nate. But any of the Nonconformists would gladly accept 
State recognition, public money, Acts of Parliament, seats in 
the legislature, official honours and national endowments — 
if they saw any chance of getting them. 

The religious principles of Positivism forbid it to touch 
any of these things, even if it were offered them; and it 
may thus claim to have a far higher standard of spirit- 
ual independence than Churchmen, Catholics, or Noncon- 
formists. All of these no doubt would prefer to have pubHc 
endowments, national privileges, and legislative protection 
without incurring any obligation of lay control, parliamentary 
interference, or State direction. If they could, they would 
all — from Cardinals to Shakers — take money, dignities, 
or charters whilst remaining perfectly free to manage their 
own affairs alone. But failing this impossible condition, 
they would take anything they could get at the price of 
surrendering more or less of their liberty. Sensible people 
must see that secular endowment means lay control; State 
recognition means State authority, and charters and statutes 
mean the orders of politicians. Politicians do not give these 
things or incur these cares without a quid pro quo. The only 
quid pro quo that Churches can give politicians is the using 
their pulpits or their confessionals to influence votes. The 
very essence then of State Churches and National Endow- 
ments is the corrupt bargain by the spiritual communion 
to do for gain the very thing which spiritual communions 
exist to prevent. And yet all Episcopal Churches and almost 
all Nonconformist sects are ready to barter their religious 
independe ice for a mess of pottage. 

The only honest and pure position for any religious asso- 
ciation is to keep itself rigidly free from any secular control 
or duty. The normal relation of the Church and the State 
is that of the Christian community in the third century 



196 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

before it sold itself for endowments and establishment to 
Constantine and his successors. "Render unto Caesar the 
things that are Caesar's" — should be its unfailing motto. 
Caesar's money and honours mean Caesar's orders. To sup- 
pose that the Church is to be loaded with dignities, privileges, 
and wealth, and yet remain its own spiritual master, is a 
hallucination that can only delude some raw curate, fresh 
from his Great-Go and Boat-club. For a century or two 
to come at least, the idea of England being united in one 
religious community is a childish dream. And whilst there 
are several Christian communities in a democratic country, 
it is an incessant source of strife to give privileges to any one. 
If all are endowed alike, at so much per head, politicians 
must exercise the ultimate control over the religious bodies 
which take their pay. A really religious body should not 
be conterminous with the State or in any way identified with 
or controlled by the State. The very term Church of Eng- 
land is a badge of degradation. A national Church is the 
type of an unspiritual, narrow, local, and Erastian Church, 
If a Church has no wider spiritual interests than the Civil 
government, unless it stands outside and above civil govern- 
ment, it does not deserve the name of Church at all. 

We need not waste time over the preposterous pretence 
that we are bound to retain the disposition of property made 
by those who are long since dead. If they wished to secure 
their possessions absolutely to themselves they should have 
carried these possessions with them to their own place. But 
as they have left their lands and their buildings, their income 
and goods, to be tilled by the living, to be guarded, repaired, 
collected, and administered by the present generation, the 
present generation have an unlimited authority to dispose 
of them in any way they think fit. It would be as silly to 
suppose that men are all bound to be circumcised and abstain 



CHURCH DISESTABLISHMENT 1 97 

from pork, because Moses so directed them three thousand 
years ago ; or because our Cathedrals were built by Catholics, 
that we are bound to continue to devote them to the mass. 
At the Reformation the Church of England by Act of Par- 
liament obtained the root and branch disestablishment and 
disendowment of the entire Catholic foundations, turned out 
all the orders and gave their property to lay speculators, and 
diverted from its destination every stone and every acre on 
which it could lay its hand. After this act of spoliation — 
one of the most violent and pitiless recorded in modern his- 
tory — it is ridiculous for the same Church, the mere creature 
and servant of the State, to talk about sacrilege and rob- 
bery when modern statesmen propose to subject it to a 
very moderate and extremely considerate application of the 
legal doctrine of cy-pres. 

The scheme proposed by the Liberal Government of 1894 
for the modification of the Church of England in a part of 
this island was a moderate and yet an honest proposal. We 
leave it to antiquated pedants to talk about the inalienable 
rights of the Church. There never was a religious commu- 
nity which had less of a sacred and immemorial character. 
It is a mere government bureau which voluntarily accepts to 
have its creed, its ritual, its discipline, its entire priesthood 
and prelacy, determined for it by laymen who are not at all 
necessarily Churchmen or even Christians. John Morley 
may yet have to appoint an Archbishop of Canterbury, and 
the late Lord Aylesbury was the "patron" of many "livings." 
We might as well talk of the "sacred rights" of the Income 
Tax or the County Police as those of the Church of England. 
The fact that it would be convenient to commence the reform 
in certain western counties and parishes, is a practical detail 
on which nothing turns. There is no Church of Wales, no 
such corporation known to the law as Church of England. 



198 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

The Church is a mere agglomerate of corporate bodies every 
one of which is under lay control, with a supreme head in a 
lay sovereign, and ordered from session to session by a 
Parliament in which Catholics and Dissenters alternately 
hold the balance. If convenient, disestablishment might 
begin in every town with more than 50,000 inhabitants. 
Ultimately, of course, it must extend to the whole of the three 
kingdoms. 

Let it not be supposed that Positivists, much less the 
present writer, feel any animosity to the Church' of England 
as a spiritual body, apart from its monopoly of privilege and 
wealth. On the contrary, we feel that it is capable of higher 
religious functions than any other Protestant body; and the 
present writer at any rate has a deep esteem for many of 
its best workers and sympathy with its intellectual, spiritual, 
and artistic traditions. As men who hold that the most 
urgent need of the time is the formation of a spiritual author- 
ity, we are certainly aware of the religious capabilities which 
abound in the Church of England. The rise of a living 
social Church is, we know, the first condition of a purer life. 
And we recognise the living elements of a Church in the 
communion of Hooker and Ken, Wesley and Keble. But 
they are choked and poisoned by the tares of ofhcial prelacy, 
legal monopoly, and scandalous endowments. Apart from 
its simoniacal constitution and its unholy alliance with the 
richer orders of laymen, the Church, as a purely spiritual 
and free society of Christian believers, might do good social 
work and raise the tone of civilisation. As a mere ecclesias- 
tical Primrose League it must remain an enemy of social 
progress and a scandal to true religion, until it can renounce 
State support and national property as completely as does 
the Catholic Church in Ireland. 



XVI 

THE RECOGNITION OF ANGLICAN ORDERS 

The public press has been much occupied of late with the 
relations of the Catholic and the Anglican Churches and 
with the policy of recent Popes in that matter; many Eng- 
lish Churchmen and English Catholics have been greatly 
stirred by the movement, into which a venerable statesman 
flung himself with his wonted ardour and eloquence. Those 
who have only a superficial knowledge of Positivists might 
possibly suppose that the whole question is one without the 
remotest interest for them; that the validity of Anglican 
orders, the historical continuity of the Churches, the views of 
Leo XIIL, Pio X., Mr. Gladstone, could only awaken in 
them a mild sense of amused bewilderment, and a wonder 
that responsible rulers of great communities should occupy 
their time with such pedantic formalism. 

This idea would imply a radical misconception. The 
question between the various Christian Churches is one in 
which we can take a serious interest, and which we by no 
means approach in a spirit of ignorance or contempt. We are 
not, and I suppose none of us ever have been, Atheists or 
Materialists in the proper sense of those terms: we do not 
accept the name of Agnostics or Sceptics, Free-Thinkers or 
Unbelievers. We hold a Positive Faith, with a systematic 
creed and a coherent body of doctrine; by that only do we 
desire to be known and described. We believe in the para- 
mount importance of an organised spiritual communion ; we 
hold by the ancient things and familiar names of Religion, 

199 



200 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Church, Worship, and Priesthood. The development, fusion, 
and schism of Churches are therefore to us very dominant 
factors in any type of social organisation. 

And, certainly, none the less that they are Christian 
Churches, and that the point at issue turns on the position 
of the Papal communion and claims. It is obvious that the 
rise and development of the Catholic Church is, in the Posi- 
tivist synthesis, far the most important phenomenon in the 
whole evolution of religion, whilst in the Positivist scheme of 
universal history, the action and reaction of the Roman type 
of Christianity occupy a place of interest that no other 
movement in history surpasses. Every word that has been 
written by Comte, every publication of our body, goes to the 
same effect, as any one might observe if he glanced at the 
lives of the Catholic worthies in our "New Calendar of 
Great Men," where they occupy about one-fifth of the whole. 
Nor do we speak in complete ignorance of the Churches as 
seen from the inside. Comte himself vv^as brought up as a 
Catholic by zealous Catholic parents. It so happens that 
in England most of us came out of orthodox Christian 
families, some of us from families in the priesthood. And 
most of us were sincere communicants in Anglican or Protes- 
tant communions until well into mature life. We have none 
of us ceased to be in close relation and in active sympathy 
with devout Christian men and women, and, indeed, with 
some who hold responsible office in one or other of the 
Churches. 

Now, to us who study the history of the Catholic Church 
as a crucial problem in social dynamics, what strikes us as 
so unaccountable is the expectation in the minds of men like 
Mr. Gladstone and Lord Halifax that something new was 
likely to arise in the way of conciliation between the Roman 
and Anglican communions out of the friendly courtesies of 



THE RECOGNITION OF ANGLICAN ORDERS 20I 

the ruling Pontiff. Leo XIII. was apparently one of the 
most sagacious and fatherly spirits who in these ages have 
occupied the Holy See. But that anything like a com- 
promise — a case of give-and-take — do ut des — was about 
to issue from his sagacity or his benevolence, does strike 
us, as impartial students of Latin Christianity from the first 
Leo to the thirteenth, as a strange hallucination. To sup- 
pose that Rome was about to move one step towards Canter- 
bury, to surrender that which has been its chief winning 
claim for fourteen centuries, to hand over the keys of St. 
Peter to heretics for an hour — was as idle as to ask for 
the Vatican to be transported en bloc to London. Without 
pretending to know what exactly was in the large mind of 
his amiable Holiness, as cool observers of ecclesiastical 
strategy, we know that there is one thing which neither Leo 
XIIL, nor any Leo XXXIII. , will ever accept, and that is, 
the sharing in joint occupancy the heavenly gifts of St. Peter 
with local schismatics. 

To admit the validity of Anglican orders is to accept the 
concurrent possession by heretics of the exclusive mystery 
solely entrusted to Peter. Upon this mystical consecration 
the whole prerogative claim of the See of Rome is based. 
To abandon it is to admit that the Rock of Peter has no greater 
virtue than any sand-heap whereon any revolting body of 
Christians may choose to build a sacerdotal sedile. It is 
really the central idea whereon rests the claim of the See of 
Rome to be Catholic and not local. With all its powers of 
adaptability, which do give some meaning to its claims of 
Catholicity, the strength of Rome lies in its immutable fixity 
in that which it regards as fundamental. In the Maelstrom 
of ever revolving change or movement, wherein modern 
society makes its primary boast, the See of Rome does seem 
to many minds the one stable point, the only solid rock in 



202 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the surge of waters. And it cannot be doubted that the 
mystical commission entrusted in the beginning of the Gos- 
pel to "the Chief of the Apostles" is — if anything else be 
so — a real "fundamental." 

Of course, we quite agree with all enlightened and learned 
Protestants that the play of words about Peter and the Rock 
is an antique quibble, without a shred of historical authority. 
Apostolical Succession, Transmission of Grace, and mystical 
foundation of the Holy See are merely phrases in which the 
superstition of ages has wrapped up a vast organisation aim- 
ing at the moral cultivation of men — one which for a certain 
time succeeded, and still, in a degree, succeeds in its task. 
We are quite ready to allow the Catholic Church full credit 
for any useful social purposes it fulfils, without making too 
much of the obsolete figments on which it professes to rest 
its authority, just as we can accept the British Monarchy 
as a part of the Constitution, though we reject the antique 
fiction that the Crown has a divine right. But when we are 
confronted with the rival claims of the Catholic and Anglican 
orders, it does seem incomprehensible that serious and devout 
Anglicans can be found to stickle for such double-distilled 
transcendentalism. The divine commission of Peter and 
his successors is at any rate lost in the mist of antiquity and 
has received the allegiance of eighteen centuries. The 
divine commission of Parker and his successors is quite recent 
and prosaic — well within the bounds of historic verifica- 
tion. To us it sounds like the burlesque imitation of a 
miracle-play. 

This brings us back for the hundredth time to wonder at 
the trifling gain to intellectual consistency for which Angli- 
canism sacrifices so much that is the strength of Rome. 
The sacramental theory it teaches is not a whit more scientific 
than the Sacrifice of the Mass, and loses much in spiritual 



THE RECOGNITION OF ANGLICAN ORDERS 203 

efficacy. The Thirty-nine Articles do not seem to us more 
rational, nor even more intelligible, than the Papal Syllabus. 
Whether there be seven sacraments, or only two, is in itself 
a dispute about words. If a sacrament is a ceremonial 
commemorative of true Christian communion, then two 
sacraments are too few; and if a sacrament is a mystical 
infusion of supernatural grace, then they are too many. 
To take a vast body of transcendental hypotheses, resting 
on a vague mass of unverifiable traditions and inscrutable 
writings, having a huge accretion of custom and ceremonial 
that has grown up during eighteen centuries, and commands 
sympathy from hundreds of millions in all parts of the world 
— to pare off a hypothesis here and there, to pick and choose 
in the inscrutable writings, to turn poetry into prose, and 
drama into narrative, to convert the gorgeous old litanies and 
ceremonies into dull and arid forms that have no more sci- 
entific reality than the old, this does seem a needless parade 
of hypocritical reformation. 

To those who study the conditions and relations of Religion 
as seen in the whole course of human civilisation over the 
Planet, all forms of Theology are without verification or 
demonstration, i.e. are mere hypotheses, figments, or crea- 
tions of the human mind. The varieties in these hypotheses 
and figments are of quite minor importance in logic, and are 
for the most part utterly trivial. That certain theological 
hypotheses are of far greater moral and social efficacy than 
are others is indeed most true ; and this determines the social 
usefulness of any type of religion. We quite agree that some 
theologies have a beautiful power over the human soul, and 
have grandly conduced to human civilisation; whilst others 
have been cruel, base, or deadening. The hypotheses of 
the Incarnation and the Immaculate Conception have 
certainly had powerful moral reactions on men and on na- 



204 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

tions; whilst the hypotheses of Moloch and Jaggernauth 
have had an evil reaction on the whole. But logically speak- 
ing, unverified and unverifiable hypotheses stand on much the 
same ground of intellectual hollowness. The ground may 
give way under them at any moment, so soon as scientific 
habits of thought begin to prevail. To pare away half-a- 
dozen corollary hypotheses from a vast hypothetical super- 
structure and leave the rest standing, whilst supplying no 
new support to the ground on which the whole is based, does 
nothing to make the edifice secure. The whole thing may 
come down with a crash by its own weight. 

What to us seems so strange in the Anglican schism is 
that, without gaining any real advance in intellectual con- 
sistency, and leaving the creed quite as hypothetical as a 
whole, the English Church practically surrenders what gives 
the Roman Church its show of stability, and its moral power 
of discipline. A Church which has its foundations, not in 
the mystical words of Christ amongst his apostles, but in 
the passions and whims of Tudor sovereigns, which makes 
its ritual a cold and half-hearted imitation of old-world 
ceremonials, which abandons the very pretence of discipline 
and converts its hierarchy into a mere aristocratic Trade- 
Guild, has ceased to be what from a broad view of human 
history, we ought to call a Church, and, as an institution, it 
is a mere historic survival, like the Corporation of London, 
or the Inns of Court. Certainly, there are in its ranks many 
men of great learning, piety, and goodness, and it represents 
continually the gathering together of some beautiful spirits. 
But much more than this is required to make a Church in 
the historic and social sense, as a dominant and organised 
Spiritual Power, at least co-equal with the Temporal Power. 
This Anglicanism never was, or pretended to be. For such 
a historic survival to busy itself about the Apostolical Sue- 



THE RECOGNITION OF ANGLICAN ORDERS 205 

cession of its Orders, is really a claim quite as purely anti- 
quarian and as practically preposterous, as if the Right 
Honourable the Lord Mayor were to insist on being sum- 
moned to the Cabinet Councils. 

It is wonderful that a statesman of the vast experience of 
Mr. Gladstone should be willing to run all the risks which 
any rapprochement between Rome and Canterbury would 
involve, Anglicanism, under the suspicion of Romanising, 
would lose much more than it would gain by any advance 
in its Ecclesiasticism. Those who care about the technical 
title-deeds of Churches, who deeply value the personal and 
social power of a Church, and who set Christianity far above 
logic, reason, proof, and science — all such will ultimately 
join Rome, which is the historic, natural, organic form of a 
Christian Church. Those who think more of the real 
efficiency of a religious community than of its legal techni- 
calities, or those who think any Church a mischievous and 
obsolete interference with the human conscience, as well as 
those who refuse to let any kind of religion, in the name of 
Moses, Christ, Peter, or Mahomet, pretend to be more true 
than science, more sacred than Humanity, more certain than 
demonstration — such will not join Rome. And, a fortiori, 
they will not join Canterbury — whether the Pope "recog- 
nises its Orders," or, remarking with a sigh ''Ego sum 
Fetrus^'' simply says Nan possumus. 



XVII 

THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH 

(1899) 

Since the Church of England claims to be a national Church, 
established by law and regulated by Act of Parliament, 
endowed with political privileges and vast national posses- 
sions, its condition and future concern Agnostics as well as 
all other citizens; and they have every right to take part 
in the political agitation which it has chosen to create. 
Again, as having very deep interest in the restoration of re- 
ligion and spiritual union, with no prejudice against any 
sincere religious movement, Positivists are especially able to 
take a thorough and impartial view of this very interesting 
crisis in the Christian world. They have much sympathy 
with both those permanent religious sentiments which are 
now face to face, struggling for mastery — the desire to 
make congregational worship both beautiful and imposing — 
the resolve to maintain personal devotion in moral purity, 
truth, and manliness. 

If this religious crisis were now passing in the Catholic 
Church, in the Jewish synagogues, in any of the Protestant 
communions, it would not concern us to intervene, nor should 
we feel any interest in so doing. But the position of the 
Church of England is quite different. Its boast and glory is 
to represent the nation and to be bound up with a complex 
set of political functions, institutions, and privileges. A lay 

206 



THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH 207 

Prime Minister, who may be a Jew or an Atheist, appoints 
the prelates; he could carry measures completely refash- 
ioning the system of worship, discipline, or doctrine. Any 
such measures would be enacted by the votes of Catholics, 
Nonconformists, Jews, and Agnostics, who might be a large 
majority in Parliament. Any lay parishioner of exemplary 
life and conduct, who has been baptized, and has duly per- 
formed all legal obligations in his parish, can enforce his 
rights to the ministrations of the national church, whatever 
his personal opinions; and, though he publicly deny every 
one of the Thirty-nine Articles, his parish priest cannot 
examine or punish him, nor can he deny him the offices or 
exclude him from his place in church. All this is the pride 
of the Church as a body, the sole justification for its political 
prerogatives, and the ground of its claim to be comprehen- 
sive, tolerant, and truly Catholic, 

Individual Churchmen deeply resent this slavery; and 
some priests are foolish enough to think it possible to retain 
establishment, endowments, and prerogatives, and yet have 
that absolute freedom from all State or lay control which 
the Catholic priesthood naturally enjoys. That of course is 
absurd. They cannot have it both ways : — Establishment 
with all its wealth and seats of the mighty, its prestige and 
its political powers; and yet an Establishment sublimely 
defiant of the State or of any lay control. Every Christian 
communion in these islands — except one — is free. The 
Church of England has sold its freedom for wealth and 
power. It can recover its freedom and become a spiritual 
body again. But it cannot go forth to begin a higher life 
until it has left behind the magnificent temples, estates, and 
monuments which the Tudors tore away from the Catholic 
Church, and until it has disgorged all the lordly and splen- 
did prerogatives it has appropriated in its days of Erastian 



2o8 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

subserviency, as the parasite of the ruling class and the 
agent of class oppression. 

Nor can it be said that English Positivists are Pagans and 
Gentiles, without sympathy or understanding in the prob- 
lems of Anglican Churchmen. The Church of Humanity 
in England is indeed one of the off-shoots and free com- 
munions which the expansive and elastic spirit of Anglican- 
ism has nurtured and bred. The Positivist movement in 
England was founded by an Anglican priest, and has been 
developed by his pupils and friends from Anglican colleges, 
schools, and Church institutions. Some of the most active 
writers and lecturers in the Service of Man were bred up 
in rectories and high-church homes and were trained for the 
Christian ministry. Many of us have been devout Church- 
men until manhood, honest communicants, and sincere 
believers; and many of us still share in Christian worship 
from time to time without repugnance or contempt, and are 
closely connected with earnest Churchmen, both clerical 
and lay. The sympathy with Catholic rituals and sacer- 
dotalism which ignorant Agnostics impute to Positivists is a 
remnant of our early religious training, so far as any such 
sympathy exists at all. As men who from childhood have 
been deeply imbued with traditions and sentiments of the 
Church, yet who in mature life gradually evolved a religious 
hope which even the Church Catholic is not broad enough 
to satisfy, Positivists are peculiarly apt to view the Anglican 
problem with sympathetic and impartial eyes. 

What is commonly called Ritualism is a very small matter ; 
and it ought not to cause any serious problem in the Church. 
If that were all, the demand of the Bishops and sensible 
Churchmen to give them time to restore discipline and to 
leave the question to paternal counsel and episcopal tact, 
would be eminently wise and practical. It would serve to 



THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH 209 

restore order as it has so often served before. The Church 
of England is a big thing in any case, and quiet men of the 
world naturally decline to pull it to pieces for a squabble 
about trivial matters of form — such as incense, candles, 
asperging, vestments, and genuflexions. Sour Puritans may 
be scandalised, but that is because their ideas of religion 
are narrow and hide-bound. Those who look for a Human 
Religion are only too glad to see Christians seeking a more 
beautiful and historic form of cult, and reviving some of the 
venerable rites of artistic Polytheism and of Eastern mysti- 
cism. There is nothing Christian about incense, holy water, 
processions of priests, prostrations, turning to the Eastern 
Sun, anointing, purification, and sacramental oblations 
and libations. All these things were borrowed by Catholics 
from Polytheistic and Theocratic rituals. And Positivists 
can only rejoice to see these immemorial habits of human 
religion borrowed again from Catholics by Anglican priests 
and Churchmen. 

But the revival of antique and graceful rites, which have 
never been quite extinct in the English Church, is not all. 
There is a far broader problem — one which sixty years ago 
shook the Church to its foundations, but which is to-day a 
far deeper and more organised movement. That is the in- 
tense craving of an influential body of Anglicans, lay as well 
as clerical, for reunion with the Catholic Church. That 
deep longing to "go home," as so many devout men and 
women call it, has never been quite suppressed in the English 
Church; and in an age of intellectual and sentimental 
reaction like the present it is stronger and wider than it has 
ever been, perhaps since the time of Laud. What was a 
sporadic sentiment in the days of Newman and Manning 
is now an organised and reasoned movement. It is perhaps 
difficult to estimate its strength in the way of numbers. It 



2IO REALITIES AND IDEALS 

must count its priests by four figures and its laymen by five 
figures, to say the least. But figures go for little in such 
things. Spiritual things are ruled by influence, and by 
commanding natures. And if there were but a score of 
such in the movement, it ought to bring sleepless nights to 
the Bishops and to the Ministers who make and control 
the Bishops. 

Of course, Positivists will not be disturbed if a wholesale 
"conversion" to Rome take place in the Anglican Church. 
We look on it not only as natural, but as inevitable. We 
have long been accustomed to treat the Church Catholic 
as the only essential form of Christianity, and Protestantism 
as an illogical and temporary make-shift. But collective 
reunion with Rome, as recent events have proved, is not at 
all a simple matter. Men and women, priests and laymen, 
may "go over" separately in any numbers. But when it 
comes to any kind of amalgamation of corporate bodies, the 
trouble begins. Rome will not yield an inch — of course 
not. It would not be Rome if it did. As to orders, discipline, 
dogma, ritual — it is absolute submission to Peter, or noth- 
ing. This is very grievous even to the most Catholic-minded 
Anglican priest. Laymen, of romantic loyalty to our gracious 
Sovereign, feel the old Protestant qualm about the Pope of 
Rome in these realms. Lord Halifax and his lay friends 
and many young curates may desire reunion. But there is 
one cruel difiiculty still. The great majority of Anglican 
priests have wives, or hope to have wives. In joining the 
Catholic Church they give up their orders and all hope of a 
priestly career. They sink into the lay crowd. For them it 
is written over the portal of Rome — Lasciaie ogni speranza, 
voi, ch' entrate. They long to be Catholic; but can they 
renounce the priesthood to which their whole lives are 
dedicated ? 



THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH 211 

There is also another dilemma. We hear a great deal 
about "lawlessness in the Church," and we shall hear much 
more. Now this "lawlessness" is not a mere Romanising 
tendency. It is an ingrained temper of anarchy, self-will, 
and self-conceit which the chaotic state of the Establishment 
in the last fifty years has bred in the priesthood. For sheer, 
obstinate, arrogant individualism it would be difficult to 
match a high ritualist, at least within any ministerial func- 
tion. For all their passionate ritualism, these men are per- 
sonally as stiff-necked and as opinionated as a Free Kirk 
elder. There are dozens of distinct "Unions" and "Asso- 
ciations," scattering the seeds of disunion: all differing from 
each other on matters great and small; and each bent on 
going its own way to the end. The temper, traditions, and 
instincts of the true Catholic priesthood differ from those of 
the "revolting parsons," as completely as the discipline of a 
Prussian guardsman differs from that of a British volunteer. 
Lawlessness, loose discipline, and individualism are bred 
in the law and traditions of Anglicanism. The Romanisers 
all want to go to Rome by different routes, and personally 
to conduct their group of travellers when they get there. If 
the whole body of the Anglican clergy were suddenly to be 
reconciled to the Pope, it may be doubted if even the enor- 
mous forces at the disposal of Peter could drill them into 
the true temper of Catholic submission. Heresies, revolts, 
and scandals would make uneasy the head that wears the 
Triple Crown. 

After all, the real point is a much more definite and serious 
one. It is this — the sacerdotal claim : first, to perform the 
miracle of the "Mass," i.e. to turn bread and wine into God; 
and secondly, to absolve the sinner from God's wrath by 
Confession and Absolution as part of compulsory discipline 
and ordinary communion. It is true that these rites are 



212 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

understood by Churchmen and even amongst Ritualists, 
with immensely varying shades of meaning : from that which 
is a gross objective miracle to that which is a mere subjective 
sentiment — from the horrible bullying of weak girls down 
to the occasional outpouring of a burdened soul. It is quite 
true also that the official language of the Establishment, with 
that spirit of shuffling in which it was begotten and bred, 
does admit of being strained from one extreme to the other. 

But in the medley of double-entente which composes the 
Anglican code, there is one thing certain, which is this. The 
English Church broke off from the Church Catholic because 
it denied that a priest could or should objectively turn a bit 
of bread into Christ, or force penitents to have their sins 
personally wiped out in habitual secret confession. Now, a 
very determined and influential body of Anglican priests 
are resolved to introduce both these practices in their most 
material and imperious form. It signifies little that at 
present they are not numerous. Those whom they influ- 
ence, and those who approve the rites and practices whereby 
the central aims of sacerdotalism are disguised, are very 
numerous. The extreme Romanisers are secret, uncandid, 
and unscrupulous. And all the devices of incense, asperges, 
antiphones, copes, reservation for the sick, and weak con- 
sciences, are merely the trappings and excuses of the great 
sacerdotal miracle, or of the coveted sacerdotal power to give 
the sinner a free conscience and light heart. 

There lies the gravity of the crisis. In the days of New- 
man some earnest Churchmen sought rest for their troubled 
intellects in Rome. Now an organised but secret body of 
Anglican priests are bent on taking over to Rome whole 
sections of their Church, and at least large congregations en 
bloc. Short of this, they are bent on practising within the 
Church those sacerdotal acts of a supernatural commission 



THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH 2I3 

which the Reformed Church was founded to stop. Will 
this succeed? At present these extreme men are a small 
minority; but they are resolute and know their own minds. 
Few as they are, they have around them a large body of 
Ritualists, clerical and lay, who are not at all prepared to 
go to the end, but who fervently cling to the trivial externals 
wherein the miracles are draped. These mere "Ritualists," 
who are possibly within the ambiguities of Church law, 
may number a third or a quarter of the congregations of the 
larger towns. They would bitterly resent being deprived 
of their incense, candles, holy water, vestments, and proces- 
sions, and would rise against bishops, judges, or legislators 
who tried to put them down. 

On the other hand, they are still a minority of the nation, 
exclusively drawn from the richer classes of the towns. To 
sanction within the Established Church the real objective 
miracles and confessional, with the priest's power of personal 
absolution as an habitual rite, would be to effect a greater 
revolution than anything that has been done since the time 
of Elizabeth. It may come ; but at present the mass of the 
electorate would refuse by ten to one to admit it into the 
Establishment. But the ritualist movement is now so strong, 
with leaders so immeasurably superior both in character 
and brains to any of the old Evangelicals, the tidal wave to 
Catholicism runs now so broad and deep, that it looks like 
a hopeless task for the Bishops to stem, with bland episcopal 
counsels, the tendency they have so long trifled with, minimised, 
and even encouraged. And yet if they do not, if there be more 
rebellion, more scandals, more open Romanism in the 
Church, the British public — which is still Protestant in the 
mass — will knock aloud at the doors of the House of Lords 
and of Commons ; and will insist that these Popish practices 
and priestly usurpations shall no longer be carried out by 
the wealth and prerogatives of a Parliamentary Church. 



XVIII 

PRIMARY EDUCATION 

(1897) 

The elementary teaching of the children of the people, 
which ought to be a simple problem for experts in finance and 
in administration, has been most woefully obscured by the 
clamour of sects and priests. The greater part of the hot 
controversy we have lately heard turns on the question — 
"How shall the children be got to profess, or at least to be 
counted as members of this or that theological sect ? " Those 
who cry out most loudly about the "intolerable strain" on 
the voluntary schools are often those who care least for the 
education of the people, those who would gladly do anything 
they could to discredit and reduce the efficiency of the Board 
schools. The real aim is to get hold of public money to pro- 
mote Church interests — not in order to teach the children. 
Underneath the whole agitation is the unfair, untrue, 
misleading use of the term "voluntary schools." There are 
no voluntary schools. A "voluntary" school once meant a 
school supported by voluntary subscriptions — like a hos- 
pital, a club, or an institution, maintained by the subscrip- 
tions of those who think they serve a good purpose. Ele- 
mentary schools managed by churches and sects are almost 
as completely State or Public schools as are any Board 
schools. The "voluntary" element is now (in 1897) re- 
duced to less than one-sixth — \yhich is not a bona fide 
proportion at all. If a hospital got more than five-sixths 

214 



PRIMARY EDUCATION 21$ 

of its income from public grants and less than one- sixth 
from its subscribers, could it continue to inscribe on its portal 
the proud motto — "supported by voluntary subscriptions" ? 
It would be a fraud. What is the point at which clerical 
managers will cease to call denominational schools "volun- 
tary," on the ground that there are still some subscribers 
left? If the sixth part fell to a twelfth, or a twenty-fourth 
part, would they still be "voluntary" schools? They would, 
no doubt, insist on being denominational, and also self-con- 
trolled — whilst maintained out of the general taxes. 

Now, Newton Hall is a true "voluntary" school, and I can 
hardly think of any other. Newton Hall is a place of edu- 
cation, wholly maintained by the free offerings of those who 
desire the success of its work. The whole of the expenses 
of every kind are provided by voluntary gifts, and the whole 
of the teaching is offered without payment or fee by those 
who choose to accept it. We should decline to accept any 
kind of public money from the State, the Rates, or County 
Council, because we would accept no control, no test, no 
inspection, no examination, and no interference from any 
official authority. Public money implies public control; 
and Newton Hall consistently refuses both. But the de- 
nominational bodies which clamour for public money without 
submitting to public control, and which claim the right to 
teach dogmas very odious to many tax-payers, base their 
claim on a juggling use of the word "voluntary." 

There are hospitals, libraries, musical societies, honestly 
and truly voluntary, which are doing as much good work 
as the "voluntary" schools. It would be ridiculour if they 
clamoured to have imore than five-sixths of their expenditure 
found them by the State, and still claimed the right to provide 
only such medical aid, such books, such entertainment, as 
they thought good, however repugnant these might be to 



2l6 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the tax-payers who found the funds. Why should not the 
Homceopathic Hospital, the London Library, the People's 
Palace, complain of the "intolerable strain" on them caused 
by the competition of Bartholomew's, the British Museum, 
and the National Gallery, with the "bottomless purse" of 
the nation? Foundation Schools, Colleges, Universities, 
and Scientific Colleges, neither ask nor obtain grants from 
taxation, without submitting their management to public 
and official control. 

"When the nation undertook to found a complete and sys- 
tematic plan of public instruction for the children of the 
people, there was only one logical and permanent basis. 
It was for the State to offer a general, free, quite elementary, 
but strictly secular instruction — giving every facility for 
the religious communions to work their own schools as they 
pleased, but without grants of money, and to have full op- 
portunity and the use of the school-houses for the religious 
teaching of their own members. It was a fatal mistake to 
make education compulsory. Almost alone of social re- 
formers, the Positivists, along with some followers of Herbert 
Spencer, opposed compulsion. Most of the evils and con- 
troversies followed on the unwise and unconstitutional craze 
for compulsion. The attempt to force a theological education 
on masses of people who held a dozen different theologies, 
and many of them none at all, was a fatal dilemma. The 
results were all the feeble compromises and what Mr. Riley 
and his friends call " School Board religion." Positivists can 
sympathise with this dislike of a "School Board religion," 
which, after all, is only an attempt to get something colour- 
less which shall be no definite religion at all, and yet which 
all those who have deep feelings on religion very much reject. 

If Positivists urge a system of secular education in all 
State schools, and in all schools receiving public money, it 



PRIMARY EDUCATION 21 7 

is not that they advocate secular education by itself, for 
Positivists are most fervent believers in a truly religious 
education. In principle we hold that education ought to be 
imbued with the religion of both teachers and taught, and 
indeed that it is a part of religion, and a kind of religion. 
Because they give to religious education a meaning so wide, 
real, and sincere, they object to lay officials of the State 
attempting to give religious education. As a matter of 
principle, we would see all education strictly religious, 
taught by men whose lives are dedicated to religion, with 
religious ideas, emblems, and forms at every turn to ennoble 
and inspire every step in the education. 

The kind of religious education claimed by Anglicans or 
Catholics is, after all, but a stunted kind of compromise, and 
does not go far enough. In Newton Hall, however rudi- 
mentary are its resources, arithmetic, geometry, physics, or 
sociology may receive a tone that is at once scientific and 
religious, and there is not a lesson that cannot be clothed 
with a religious sanction and religious associations. That 
can be done by the Positivist scheme of thought, and by 
that alone. And thus Positivists can sympathise with all 
that Mr. Riley or Cardinal Vaughan insist as to the value 
of a religious elementary school. Only we say — not in 
the perfunctory way that a State-paid official would give it, 
and certainly not with our money, any more than Mr. Riley 
or Cardinal Vaughan would like to have Positivism taught 
at their expense. Let Catholics, Anglicans, and Positivists 
give their own children a Catholic, Anglican, or Positivist 
education from first to last. But let neither of them ask 
Baptists, Jews, Theists, and Agnostics to pay for it. Still 
less, let none of these suppose that a really religious education 
in their sense can ever be taught by compelling children to 
learn a catechism and repeat a few prayers. 



2l8 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

But this ideal of a denominational education cannot yet 
be reached, with millions of children to be taught, of differ- 
ent religious persuasions and of none at all. The solution 
is plain and simple. Give them the best attainable ele- 
mentary schools, without fee, without compulsion, open to 
all freely — instruction strictly confined to rudiments — 
hours not very long — no pretence of religious instruction 
— no public money without public management. Then let 
the prayers, ceremonies, and all religious teaching, and any 
devotional practice desired, be supplied by various religious 
bodies on their own terms, in their own ways, in the public 
schoolrooms if they like, in their own churches or school- 
rooms if they prefer it, but entirely at their own costs and 
charges. There would thus be : — (i) Public elementary 
schools, for rudiments only, in every sense free, and without 
any religious instruction. (2) Religious instruction, offered 
by religious bodies, purely voluntary, in or out of the public 
school-houses, at the sole management and cost of such 
bodies, but with every material facility found them by the 
public authority. There would be (3) voluntary denomi- 
national .schools, managed, maintained, and founded by 
religious bodies at their sole cost and responsibility, receiv- 
ing no public money, but any inspection, convenience, or 
examination which they chose to accept. 

When the Act of 1870 was first applied I put forth a 
paper insisting on these views — that there should be no 
compulsion, no fees, no religious instruction, nothing but 
the rudiments, and strict attention to health and sanitary 
conditions. It is not the business of the State, I said, to 
undertake any religious instruction whatever. When the 
State (which has to do with the tax-gatherer and the police- 
man) attempts to inculcate opinions, it ends in the oppres- 
sion of the people as well as the perversion of truth. But 



PRIMARY EDUCATION 219 

every facility may properly be given to the free development 
of voluntary efforts by such bodies as make it their business 
to appeal to conscience, not to force. Education on such 
lines flourishes in countries where education is most success- 
ful. In France, in Germany, in the United States it is not 
found that Protestant and Catholic children will not submit 
to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic unless these are 
preceded by devotional acts and followed by dogmatic teach- 
ing in the ritual, catechisms, and manuals of their special 
church and sect. Catholics and Protestants give their own 
dogmatic teaching in their own way. And the sole reason 
on which Churchmen in England pretend that they cannot 
do the same is that the Establishment here has long had a 
preponderant influence over the Legislature. 

The recent agitation to secure more public money for 
sectarian schools whilst retaining sectarian management is 
based upon a misleading use of a plain term, and is an 
attempt still further to encroach on fundamental principles 
of our public life. It is not so much the children as the 
Churches in whose interest the demands are made; not the 
schools which feel the "intolerable strain" so much as the 
sects which desire to have subscriptions replaced by taxes. 
And they seem to have no confidence that the children will 
attend the special religious instruction unless it is part of 
the official curriculum. But this is only to call on the State 
to help them to fill not so much their schools as their churches, 
as if State-supported schools were to be converted into an 
entrance cloister to the Church. The language which has 
been used of late by the more violent advocates of denomi- 
national schools is so unreasonable and contrary to all 
principles of English policy, that it will assuredly advance 
the day when the nation will revise the whole system of 
hollow compromise now in operation, and will fall back on 



220 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the only basis of a permanent settlement. In the mean- 
time, we must hold fast to the only possible rules of a sound 
system : — 

1. No public money without public control and official 

management responsible to the public body supply- 
ing the money. 

2. Secular instruction in rudiments to be given in all 

State or rate-supported schools. 

3. Religious instruction to be given by religious com- 

munities in their own way and at their own cost. 



XIX 

METROPOLITAN SCHOOL BOARD 

(1870) 

Having been invited by a strong Committee to come forward 
as a candidate for the first London School Board (1870), 
/ submitted to them the following address. 

To THE Electors for the Westminster 
District 

I AM unexpectedly called on to offer myself for election to 
the Metropolitan School Board; and I beg to submit the 
following statement of my views : — 

The work before us is how to give to a million of un- 
taught children the common rudiments of knowledge. It is 
nothing less than this — and it is nothing more. To en- 
cumber this simple end with religious, social, or political 
designs, would be to make that impossible which is already 
difficult. 

The late Act may be made to give the people a plain 
elementary education, if this its purpose is worked out with 
energy and good sense. It will certainly fail if it be made 
a field for religious and political cabals. 

The great task before the School Board will be to see 
that no class of the people are left outcasts from the scheme. 
The right way to bring them into the schools is to make 
them truly the schools of the people; schools which they 
can feel proud of as their own. Root out all class and sec- 



222 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

tarian jealousies, make the life of the children there more 
healthy and more happy, and the schools will be filled with- 
out the oppressive machinery of foreign bureaucracy. The 
problem is how to make the schools really useful, rather 
than how to force the people to use them. 

But schools are a mockery to the very poor, unless they 
are free. And, since the use of a public institution can 
never be degrading, the primary education of the State 
should be in principle gratuitous. 

This need involve no undue burden on the tax-payer. 
Elementary education means the ordinary rudiments of 
knowledge, and to that I would strictly confine it. The 
National School, though it is to teach a great many chil- 
dren, is not to teach too many things. I am entirely opposed 
to the views of those who see in the Act a new scheme for 
the diffusion of moral, scientific, and technical knowledge. 
Education in the high and wide sense of the term belongs 
to a different and independent agency. And I am wholly 
opposed to the State undertaking a task so vast and so 
vague by means of a national tax. 

On this ground I hold that it is not the business of the 
State to undertake any religious instruction whatever. When 
the State (which has to do with the tax-gatherer and the 
policeman) attempts, to inculcate opinions, it ends in the 
oppression of the people, as well as the perversion of truth. 
Things that belong to conscience I would leave to the free 
efforts of those powers which appeal to reason and do not 
rest on force. On these grounds I hold that State education 
should be not only unsectarian but secular. 

But if the State has a very limited sphere in education, 
every facility may be given for the free development of 
voluntary efforts. There is no real difficulty in working a 
State education in the common rudiments, alongside of a 



METROPOLITAN SCHOOL BOARD 223 

higher education given by independent bodies in their own 
way and at their own cost. 

It is important that any scheme of education should offer 
exactly equal advantages to girls as to boys; and, indeed, 
that the general instruction of both should be in principle 
the same. 

Much must be done that schools may promote and not 
injure the health of the children. Short hours, ventilation, 
exercise, and rational amusements are absolutely indispen- 
sable; without which the school becomes for the young too 
often a prison or a sick-house. I believe it quite practicable 
to add to instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, 
some plain music — (not psalm singing) , the rudiments of 
drawing, and some of those means of preserving health 
which are common to the children of the rich. 

If these opinions are likely to meet with any support, I 
am prepared to offer myself for election to the Board; but 
as it would be to me nothing but an onerous task, I have 
on principle declined to canvass for support or to incur any 
expense. 



XX 

PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATURE 

(1884) 

Reply to an invitation from the Liberal Committee of Leicester 
to become a candidate, 1884 

I SHOULD count it no small honour to be selected, without 
any seeking of mine, by such a constituency as Leicester; 
but I feel no desire to enter the House of Commons. 

I have hitherto declined to become a candidate, because 
I prefer to do what I can to form public opinion rather than 
to represent it in Parliament. In order that opinion may 
be formed in a really free way, there need to be at least some 
politicians who can speak out without regard to party exi- 
gencies or the immediate wishes of any constituency. Par- 
liamentary government cannot be worked without party 
discipline, and party discipline implies the constant giving 
of votes on other grounds than personal conviction. Were 
I in Parliament, I should be very slow to join in a mutiny 
or to enter a "cave," for I recognise the paramount duty of 
compromise in a practical legislator. But this makes it all 
the more essential that some of those who seek to influence 
opinion should be free from any concern for majorities, 
whether in or out of the House. One of the most sinister 
signs of the day is the readiness of statesmen to treat the 
bias of a majority as equivalent to right. 

I am publicly pledged to certain opinions which I could 

224 



PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATURE 22$ 

not waive for tactical convenience; but which I could 
hardly expect any constituency to leave me free to assert. 
There are three great ends in politics which I have specially 
at heart. The first is to resist the policy of Aggression, to 
check the increase of the Empire, and to prepare for its 
inevitable reduction. The second is to deprive the State of 
any control over religion, and to make it strictly neutral in 
matters of opinion and in public education. The third is to 
remedy the paralysis of government caused by the inter- 
ference of Parliament with the business of administration. 
I doubt if the House of Commons is at present the field 
where any one of these principles can be most effectively 
urged. The present war (in South Africa, 1884) I look on 
as one of the most wanton crimes and one of the most gratui- 
tous burdens which have ever been imposed on our country. 
But it seems in vain to use this language in a House where 
both sides are equally eager for dominion. 

Were I to enter on a statement of my political views, 
some of them might be thought too far advanced and others 
too Conservative. I would restrict the power of all heredi- 
tary authorities in government, with a view to their final 
extinction. I would recast our system of land laws, with a 
view to make the landowner and the cultivator one. I would 
support a genuine local government, both for town and 
country. And I am for Home Rule in Ireland. On some 
of the minor questions I am probably out of harmony with 
Radical majorities. I am opposed to compelling people to 
become temperate by law, or to force them into State schools. 
I am for a simple manhood franchise, and a complete redis- 
tribution of seats; but I am opposed to any representation 
of minorities, or groups, and also to women's suffrage. I 
am also averse to any change in the marriage law, or to any 
relaxation of the laws for the prevention of disease and the 

Q 



226 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

punishment of crime. I would not further extend the 
powers of the State to check malpractices by private citi- 
zens ; but I would strictly enforce the powers which the State 
already possesses, and make them a reality. 

These, however, are questions on which I need not enlarge. 
In my opinion, the problems of the day require social more 
than legislative solutions; and as my interests lie mainly 
with the former, I do not seek the honour of a seat in 
Parliament. 



XXI 

REFORM OF THE LORDS 

(1906) 

The part of the Upper House in our parliamentary system 
is at last seen to be the critical question of our time. Are 
the Lords to be the ultimate Court of Appeal, without whose 
consent no legislation can proceed? 

By the first Reform Act of 1832, the middle classes in 
England obtained a preponderant influence in domestic 
affairs, though practically administered by a Liberal aris- 
tocracy which kept international policy in its own control. 
From the first Reform Act of 1832 down to the third of 
1885, the House of Lords, as a body of the Legislature, was 
neither strong nor respected. Socially, of course, the Peers 
retained their prestige, perhaps even increased it by im- 
mense creations (about 150 in twenty years), and by pro- 
fusely admitting wealth and public service. But the House 
of Lords was expected to give way, when seriously confronted 
with the House of Commons, and would not venture to act 
as a "blocker" to measures which passed the Lower House 
by large majorities. Until a generation ago, such a pro- 
ceeding would have been thought to risk its very existence 
as a Legislative body. 

But the formation of a genuine democratic constituency 
by the legislation of 1885 altered all this. It was seen that 
the Lower House was, or would be soon, under the influence 
of the Labour masses, and that Labour was being rapidly 

227 



228 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

coloured by a more or less indefinite Socialism. When an 
eminent Whig aristocrat had gaily declared, "We are all 
Socialists now!", the whole of the capitalist and trading 
class began to distrust the House of Commons as a palla- 
dium of Property, Religion, and Order ; and they turned to 
the House of Lords as the last stronghold of our ancient 
social institutions and the rights of Property, whether in- 
herited or acquired in business. For a whole generation 
the House of Peers has become the real but unofi&cial Legis- 
lature of the Empire. Bills are debated in the Commons; 
but no measure of Reform, vitally affecting Society or 
Property, could pass unless it be approved by the Lords. 

Old-fashioned Radicals and Labour Democrats kept on 
repeating the obsolete cry that the Peers "represent noth- 
ing but themselves." The exact contrary is the truth. To- 
day they represent the preponderant power of the rich, 
educated, and trained classes, the learned professions, the 
tradesmen, the owners of property real and personal, the 
titled orders down to the cadets of a city knight. And to 
these they add the interests of the Clergy, the Universities, 
official societies, the Army and Navy, and the miscellaneous 
classes whose capital is invested in the Empire, in agriculture, 
food, and drink. Of course, they only represent all these 
widespread interests in silent, secret, irregular, and obscure 
ways. They could hardly maintain their cause in any 
formal and direct conflict. All that they could do would be 
by indirect means, obstruction, procrastination, and false 
issues, to stave off any fundamental change in any of the 
great social institutions, material or moral. "Thank God, 
we have a House of Lords," is the unspoken but profound 
conviction of the immense body of the higher and middle 
orders. There are no doubt plenty of rich men and men of 
aristocratic connections and pretensions in the Commons; 



REFORM OF THE LORDS 229 

but they and the great majority of M.P.'s are under the 
control of the democracy, and dare not vote as they would 
like. So Property, Church, Services, Professions, and 
Traders have lost trust in the Commons. 

In this indirect and unperceived way, the House of Lords, 
since the defeat of Gladstone's Home Rule, has recovered 
for obstructive purposes the legislative authority it has lost 
ever since the age of Walpole and Chatham, and has again 
become after a century and a half a co-equal branch of the 
Legislature — and even something more. But there is a 
further element to this complex question. The bed-rock of 
the Constitution is the joint legislative authority of three 
independent powers — King, Lords, and Commons. The 
assent of the Crown is no longer supposed to be anything 
more than a formality. But the prestige and popularity of 
the Crown as a national asset has gained immensely during 
the seventy years of Victoria and Edward. And the Peers, 
as a sort of Society body-guard of the Crown, as the King's 
inseparable Court, have also gained not a little in popular 
interest. The public could not imagine a Crown such as 
that now worn by Edward VII., unless it were supported 
by a privileged Court. So that all ideas of "ending or 
mending" the House of Lords involve a fundamental shake 
to the Constitution as a whole. Now the Head of the 
British Constitution is at present extremely popular, even 
with the democracy. The public is not prepared to place 
the Crown alone face to face with a democratic House of 
Commons. This could not be effected without a Revolu- 
tion. And we are not ripe for revolutionary changes. 

Needless to say that I do not accept — much less defend 
— the claim of the Lords to be the ultimate power in legisla- 
tion. I am simply explaining the difficulties of the crisis, 
and deprecate the ignorant babble of democrats who say 



230 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

"Leave the Lords to us!" As Professor Dicey says in his 
Law of the Constitution (1889, p. 381), it is a maxim of the 
Constitution that the Lords must ultimately give way "to 
the dehberate will of the nation"; but no one can say when 
or how this has been made manifest. Governments have 
defied the will of the nation for years - — laughed at it, and 
trampled on it. No doubt, if, at the opening of the session, 
the House of Lords flatly rejected the general programme 
of the Government, as formulated in the Speech from the 
Throne, and in the speeches of Ministers, the general indig- 
nation of the country would have been shown with such 
unanimity and violence that the Peers would have yielded 
or risked their existence. But it was inevitable that, after 
months of debate, the composite majority, large as it was, 
should become less cohesive. Education, Chinese coolies, 
Natal wars, India, Ireland, Labour — all in turn differen- 
tiate the great Liberal majority. The opposition of the 
Lords comes on some one of these measures, not on all 
together. And the party is not quite solid on any one of 
them. 

The consequence of this is, that the Lords can defy the 
Commons on some definite point, whereon considerable sec- 
tions of the party are not only lukewarm, but even dis- 
heartened and divided. And it is always difficult to show 
that "the deliberate will of the nation" is so keenly aroused 
to carry that particular Bill that the Lords will not dare to 
resist. If they "represented nobody but themselves," it 
would be plain sailing. But, as I have shown, they silently 
represent immense forces of Wealth, Tradition, Experience, 
Self-interest. All questions and parties here, as elsewhere, 
are becoming fused in the great antagonism of Conservative 
Capitalism against Democratic Labour. Now the Lords, 
however obsolete their special privileges have become, are 



REFORM OF THE LORDS 



231 



now the last bulwark of the former, whilst the Commons 
are, in only modified degrees, the representatives of the 
latter. That the Democracy will at last have its way, I 
sincerely hope and believe. But the struggle must be very 
keen, and in this very conservative, rich, complex society of 
ours, must be protracted and doubtful. 

I am only trying now to call attention to the crisis, its 
grave difficulties and its comphcated nature. I put trust in 
the great experience, clear sense, and patient courage of the 
Prime Minister. It will need all his experience, patience, 
and resolution to lead to victory the motley hosts in his com- 
mand. The great danger is this. By the law of the Con- 
stitution, the Lords may claim to reject any Bill that is not 
plainly desired by the nation. If led with skill and cour- 
age, they may force on a new Dissolution — possibly even a 
second. A dissolution is a cruel tax on the Commons, but 
only a pleasant holiday to the Lords. Drained by election 
expenses and jealousies, torn asunder by CathoHcs, Dis- 
senters, Irishmen, Home Rulers, pro-Boers, pro -Bengalees, 
Sociahsts, Sufitragettes, Trade Unionists, ImperiaUst Liberals, 
disappointed Radicals, and all the heart-burnings of a huge 
composite majority, the national verdict of 1906 might be 
doubtful in 1909. There, ''Hke a cormorant," the Spirit of 
Evil sits, ever on the watch. And before the nation knew 
it, the food of the People might be taxed to fill the pockets 
of an organised conspiracy of capitalists. 



XXII 

A TRUE SENATE 

(1906) 

The House of Lords is not only now an anomaly in our 
system, the only purely hereditary Chamber in the civilised 
world, but it is now become the burning problem of our 
modern politics. For all the resounding phrases of Radical 
defiance, the Peers really represent, and know that they 
have behind them, immense reserve forces of the rich, the 
experienced, the trading classes, the Church, the learned pro- 
fessions, the civil and military "services," and those whom 
Democracy and Socialism alarm. If it is said that "the 
Lords represent nobody but themselves," the retort is that 
the Lords secretly represent many millions of voters whom 
the M.P.'s they elected very imperfectly represent. Not a 
few Liberal members have but half a heart for the Bills 
they are pledged to support, and for which they actually 
vote. And not a few Labour members have been elected 
by men who would be sorry to see them get their way. 
Now, the Peers practically represent immense Conservative 
masses, held in reserve. 

This fact, however unwelcome to all true Liberals, in- 
volves a most dangerous crisis, from which the only issue, 
in the face of rising Democracy, is that which we see in 
Russia as the alternative — ■ Constitutional Reform or vio- 
lent Revolution. It is plain that Englishmen will not for 
ever submit to see the formal decisions of their elective 

232 



A TRUE SENATE 233 

Chamber permanently "blocked" by a petty knot of ordi- 
nary men whose right to legislate at all is the mere accident 
of birth. The fact that accident, coupled with the dis- 
honesty and intrigues of influential men inside and outside 
the House of Commons, gives them a power which at first 
sight is preposterous, will only make the struggle more 
bitter. Thus, unless the two Houses can be brought into 
harmonious working the Constitution must suffer some vio- 
lent shock. 

We may assume that some sort of Upper House there 
will have to be. The country is certainly not prepared to 
take the plunge into a Single Democratic Chamber. All 
ideas of "ending" the House of Lords must be put aside 
as chimerical. All ideas of retaining it as it is may be put 
aside as dangerous folly. All ideas of revolutionary recon- 
struction may be regarded as at present premature. The 
immediate thing to be done is to consider how the way can 
be prepared to mend the present constitution of the House 
of Lords so that a violent collision between the Peers and 
the nation may be avoided or postponed. 

Now, the essential principle which alone can jusitfy the 
existence of a Second Chamber in a democratic society is 
the fact that its members enter it by some form of election, 
selection, service, or personal qualification — other than the 
accident of birth. The first thing to do is to put an end to 
the vicious and obsolete rule that hereditary right shall give 
legislative power. It would be a step towards this if the 
nation resolved that from a given date no new creation of a 
peer should endow his descendants with right to legislate. 
This could be done at once without an Act of Parliament, 
if the great majority of the nation insisted on this being an 
understood practice, and that the consent of the Crown 
were obtained to its being made effective. This might begin 



234 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

by Resolution in the House of Commons. There is nothing 
to prevent the Crown from creating peerages for Hfe ; though 
the House of Lords some fifty years ago decided by resolu- 
tion that a Life Peer could not sit and vote in their House. 
If it became a settled rule of politicians, at least of Liberal 
politicians, that no hereditary Peerage should in future be 
created, and if his Majesty were to be a consenting party to 
such a rule, the worst anomaly of the present system would 
receive a check. 

The irony of the situation is that such a reform would be 
exceedingly popular with the Peers themselves. If the 
Crown and the nation agreed that no hereditary Peerages 
should be henceforth created, the actual hereditary Peers 
would receive a new dignity in that the roll of their special 
order was closed. There is nothing on which the Scotch 
Peers value themselves more than that for two centuries no 
new Peer has been added to their order. It may be taken 
indeed that a great body of support, both aristocratic and 
democratic, would be given to a self-denying ordinance 
agreed upon between the Crown and all progressive politi- 
cians that no hereditary Peerage should be created in future. 
Nobility would gain a new honour without any new privilege ; 
the public would be freed from an antiquated obstruction 
without at all increasing the power of the titled class. The 
recent creations, in effect, though not in form, carried out 
this principle. 

There is nothing to prevent the Crown from creating a 
Life Peer. Whether a Life Peer could sit and vote in the 
House of Lords, without an Act of Parliament, is another 
matter. I doubt if that House, under the strain of the 
actual crisis, would venture again to close its doors to one 
who held the King's Patent. Lord Derby, at the height of 
his influence, and Lord Lyndhurst, by the magic of his elo- 



A TRUE SENATE 235 

quence, induced the Peers in 1856 to commit this folly. But 
the Memoir of the late Duke of Argyll has told us how 
nearly a well-qualified Life Peer came to take his seat with- 
out question {Memoir, ii. p. 11). It is exceedingly doubtful 
if the House would risk another struggle with a Liberal 
Government. 

In any case, I maintain that a free creation of Life Peers, 
selected from men of known character and ability, who 
had long served the public and had done the State some 
service, would prepare the way for a Second Chamber of 
wisdom, prudence, and public spirit. The last creations 
give examples of the use to be made of eminent politicians 
who have no seat in the Commons. I should like to see 
fifty, or, if they could be found, even a hundred, such men 
named as the nucleus of a true Senate. It is not likely that 
the House of Lords would imperil their very existence by 
obstinately closing their doors against men who individually 
were much their superiors in public reputation, and who as 
a body represented the deliberate choice of the Crown and 
of the Government. If the Peers doggedly refused to admit 
Life Peers, it might be the time to try legislation and see 
if they would venture to throw out a Bill empowering Life 
Peers to sit by Statute, as Lords of Appeal do now. 

If it became a practice of the Constitution not to create 
in future any hereditary peerage, and if a body of Life Peers, 
strong in numbers and reputation, were also enabled to sit 
in the House of Lords, the resistance of the old House to 
reforms would be effectually neutralised, and a gradual recon- 
stitution of the House might proceed on regular lines. An 
obvious reform would be the closing the House to Peers 
who simply succeed to a title. In time the Upper House 
would be called personally by writ as was once the rule. 
Their qualification would be personal — not hereditary. 



236 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

What the personal qualifications should be opens a very 
wide question which may be considered in a separate essay. 
For the present I limit myself to suggestions of immediate 
steps towards forming a true Senate by substituting persojial 
for hereditary claims to pass laws for the nation. 

I am quite aware that the average Radical view condemns 
any creation of new Peers, whether for life or not. The 
old-fashioned Reformer's nostrum for "abolition of the 
House of Lords" is not practical politics. England is not 
often, and not at all at present, in the mood for revolutionary 
change, unless the Peers were to act like Russian bureau- 
crats. I doubt if the country is even prepared to abolish 
the power of the Lords to throw out a Bill a second time, 
when again passed by the Commons. No such reform is 
possible without legislation which would involve a long and 
bitter struggle, for the whole constitutional rights of the 
Peers would be at stake. The suggestions I have made 
could be tried without a Bill at all, and would proceed in a 
tentative and gradual course of reform. The country, as a 
whole, desires a Second Chamber of qualified men. And I 
hold that it is more likely to get a competent Senate by 
gradually modifying the House of Lords than by any revolu- 
tionary attempt to suppress it altogether or to abrogate its 
legislative privileges at once. 



XXIII 

THE LORDS ONCE MORE 

(1906) 

The crucial problem of our time, and one full of complica- 
tions and puzzles, is the question of forming an Upper House 
worthy of our country and of the great duties which alone 
can justify the existence of a Second Chamber. Let Con- 
servatives remember that our own House of Peers is the only 
remaining legislative body in the civilised world wherein 
the representatives of some five hundred families retain the 
controlling power over the entire law-making machine, and 
can at will reduce it to a deadlock. And this exists in a 
country which is nearly as advanced a democracy as is the 
Republic of France or of America. And let thoughtful 
Conservatives further reflect that all human history can pro- 
duce no single example of an hereditary aristocracy per- 
manently retaining exclusive prerogatives against the will 
of a great nation. 

The appalling condition of Russia should make even the 
boldest reactionary hesitate before straining his obsolete 
prerogatives to the bursting-point. In theory, in law, by 
usage, the Russian nobles have as much right as has any 
English duke to "do what he likes with his own." But, 
irresistible forces are teaching them the dreadful consequences 
of persisting in enforcing their rights. 

We need not consider the Radical idea of "getting rid of 
the Lord." Greece seems to be the sole example in Europe 

237 



238 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

of a State with a Single Chamber — and the example is not 
encouraging. Whilst the great Republics of France and the 
United States retain their Senates, we may assume that this 
Conservative nation of ours will hesitate to follow the lead of 
— Greece. An Upper House of some kind we are destined 
to have. It seems equally clear that we will not for ever 
endure an hereditary Chamber such as no other civilised people 
submits to. The problem is to form a True Senate — with 
personal, not hereditary, title — to make laws for the nation. 

I believe myself that we shall ultimately come to a truly 
elective Senate — and were I to draft a new Constitution 
I would suggest election for some long period by the various 
County Councils in proportion to the numbers of their own 
constituencies. But this would mean a fundamental revision 
of the Constitution, difficult and contentious legislation, and 
a deep social and political upheaval. I content myself for 
the present with suggesting a mode of gradual reform of the 
existing House of Lords, on less drastic lines, and feasible 
without any revolutionary Acts of Parliament. 

I have already given reasons for our recurring to a system 
of Life Peers to be carefully selected from qualified public 
men as a mode of gradually permeating and reforming our 
Upper House. For the moment I limit myself to pointing 
out what might be done in this way without any violent 
collision of parties and apart from disputed legislation. A 
good deal of the same kind has been quietly done of late — 
especially by recent Prime Ministers. A hundred Fitz- 
maurices, Courtneys, Shaw-Lefevres, and Morleys would 
make the House of Lords a useful and respected body in the 
State. 

We are often told that great questions are discussed in the 
Lords with a knowledge, a sense of responsibility, and a 
breadth of view that is seldom heard in the Commons. There 



THE LORDS ONCE MORE 



239 



is much truth in this, and the reasons for it are many and 
plain. A Peer has no constituents to dazzle or to conciliate ; 
he can speak out with freedom and sincerity ; he speaks at 
his own time to a small and qualified audience ; if he chooses 
to rise, it is because he feels himself master of the subject; 
and he is indeed himself very often an old official of great 
experience and knowledge. When men like Lord Lans- 
downe, the late Duke of Devonshire and Lord Goschen, 
Lord Roberts and Lord Rosebery, Lord Curzon and Lord 
Cromer, seriously give themselves to a "full-dress debate," 
the public has to listen, and not seldom learns a good deal, 
whether it likes their opinions or not. Therein lies the pres- 
tige of the House of Lords and its real hold on the country, 
that on great occasions it justifies its claims. Those who 
deprecate change in the marriage laws, in the suffrage, in 
Church, law, and the like, put their trust in the Peers, who 
have no constituents to badger them. And those who object 
to violent revulsions in Foreign policy know that a fair con- 
tinuity of action will be maintained in the Lords. 

It may be replied: Is not the House of Lords, then, an 
invaluable institution ? No ! Because behind the twenty 
or thirty men of great public experience and proven capacity 
there are four or five hundred hereditary cyphers who take 
no part, and hardly care to attend or listen, but who vote 
mechanically at the party word of command, with no in- 
telligible ground but ingrained prejudice and pride of caste. 
The fact that the House of Lords is often addressed by capable 
statesmen, and thereby retains its hold on the country, is 
really an argument, if we consider it, that it should henceforth 
consist of capable statesmen. Let us get rid of the dead 
weight which has nothing behind it but hereditary privilege, 
and yet has the "controlling influence" in all matters of 
legislation. 



240 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

I have no taste for paper constitutions and shall not pretend 
to make precise conditions and hard-and-fast rules. But 
working suggestions are a different thing and need not be 
embodied in formal clauses. Age has always been, and 
should be, a condition to qualify the members of a true Senate. 
It would not be reasonable to name a man a Senator until 
he had reached the age of thirty-five; nor would it be quite 
practical to name him after he had passed seventy-five. The 
ideal age perhaps would be between forty and sixty, but age 
limits are not much in favour in a country where Pitt was 
Prime Minister at twenty-four and Gladstone was Prime 
Minister at eighty-four. Service of the State in important 
functions or for long periods would be a most important 
qualification. And to this would be added eminence in law, 
science, or business ; responsible office in local administration, 
public companies, and social institutions. The activities of 
our people are numerous and widespread; and it would be 
ridiculous to attempt to prescribe any narrow list of qualifica- 
tions. Whenever a Senate is to be constituted legally by an 
amendment to the Constitution, it will no doubt be necessary 
to fix definite classes who would be eligible. But as we are 
now discussing the selection of competent Life Peers by direct 
creation by the Crown, it may be enough to suggest the kind 
of qualification needed. And the recent creations afford us 
admirable types. 

All that is wanted for the moment is to turn into an under- 
stood political system the example tentatively set by two 
recent Prime Ministers. If a hundred or a hundred and fifty 
capable men could be drawn from the House of Commons 
(present or past), from the diplomatic, colonial, civil, and 
military services; from County Councils, public institutions, 
co-operative and trade societies; from the ranks of Privy 
Councillors, Judges, King's Counsel, Royal societies, and 



THE LORDS ONCE MORE 24I 

great companies, publicists, professors, and learned societies 
— and without the paraphernalia of heralds, or the endow- 
ment of families, such men could be infused into the existing 
House without any legislation or bitter contest — the nucleus 
of a true Senate would be there. The thirty or forty debating 
Peers would be glad to receive fresh blood. The five hundred 
silent and absent Peers would remain silent, absent, and 
harmless. 

This scheme is not put forward in any party sense. Both 
parties ought to be represented. But, in view of the enormous 
disproportion of Peers at present, new creations should be in 
inverse ratio to the actual balance of parties. The creation 
of hereditary Peers might still be retained as at present for 
those who court rank and honour without power. An ancient 
monarchy naturally involves a gradation of rank and royal 
favours. Only this — newly-created Peers with hereditary 
titles should have no right to sit in a Reformed Upper Cham- 
ber — either for themselves or their descendants. 



XXIV 

PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE 

{From the '^Nineteenth Century.''^ 1906) 

It is now twenty-seven years since I made bold to urge 
on Mr. Gladstone the reform of parliamentary procedure. 
Much has been done in the way of reform since that date. 
But many of the old evils remain — some of them have 
actually increased in mischief. Now, as then, the system of 
business in the House of Commons has been generally felt 
to have ominous defects. Now, as then, we have seen the 
House silenced and paralysed by its own rules; legislation 
has been choked by the plethora of forms that it involves; 
the historic "inquest of the nation" tends to become an in- 
organic public meeting. A new House and a reforming 
Government were pledged to take it in hand. And as an old 
student of comparative jurisprudence I again make bold to 
ask, Why does the British Parliament adhere to obsolete 
methods of work which all other parliaments abroad and all 
modern councils and boards at home have utterly condemned 
and rejected? Why does it do its business in ways which 
would ruin a railway or a bank, and would make a county 
council an idle debating club? 

In 1881-82 all thoughtful critics of the "deadlock in the 
House of Commons" were insisting on some mode of closing 
the- interminable debates. I protested against the use of the 
outlandish word cloture, but urged that some form of closure 
was indispensable and just. Well, closure has been adopted 

242 



PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE 



243 



and has come to stay, and has been too often used in arbi- 
trary and oppressive ways. To protect minorities against its 
abuse will be one of the first tasks of the new majority; but 
as no rules can make such abuse quite impossible, the real 
protection against abuse of the closure must always be found 
in the good faith of the Minister in charge and of the Speaker 
and his deputy. 

A second reform which we demanded twenty-seven years 
ago was some check to be placed on the monstrous perversion 
of the right of questions, which had grown to be an intolerable 
and grotesque nuisance. In the absence of any power to 
reply or to cross-examine a Minister, "questions" become 
a mere means of advertising busy-bodies, wasting time, and 
cultivating bores. This has been to a certain extent remedied. 
But until "questions" can be subjected to some responsible 
control, and carry the right to press the Minister who an- 
swers, they had better be got out of the way altogether. They 
amuse the House as a game of " cross-questions and crooked 
answers." No Minister worth his salt (of ;^20oo to ;^5ooo) 
ever tells anything that he does not desire to be known ; and, 
as he seldom tells more than a fraction of the truth, he only 
misleads those who are weak enough to believe him to be 
telling the whole. 

Years ago we protested against the intolerably long hours 
of debate — twelve hours, and at times "all night sittings," 
and sessions prolonged into September. And all this waste 
of time for nothing except now and then a petty administrative 
change, and, in happy times, one substantial reform, cruelly 
mangled and sterilised. Something has been done to redress 
the evil of late sittings and sessions in the dog-days; but it 
is agreed that there is still an immense amount of sheer waste 
of time, play, dawdling, and parading in futile divisions 
through the lobbies. We all look to the head of a really 



244 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

business House of Commons to put his foot down on the 
vugalr scandal of tea-parties on the terrace, dinner-parties in 
the cellars, gabbling nonsense to stave off a division, system- 
atic pairing, ''blocking" by sheer trickery, and minorities 
consisting of overfed, noisy young "bloods," whipped up 
from balls and supper-rooms. If "society" hopes to keep 
its prestige and its privileges a little longer, it must not 
treat the Parliament of the Empire as if it were a music- 
hall or a smoking concert. 

It is not the part of those who have not sat in Parliament 
to discuss the details of practical procedure, which may safely 
be left to the experience of the Prime Minister and the re- 
forming zeal of a House entirely recast in tone, even more 
than in persons. But it is quite open to those who have studied 
the working of other parliaments and have sat in a business 
council to suggest one substantial change in form, which 
would at once relieve the House from pressure, and im- 
mensely facilitate the work both of government and of legis- 
lation. That reform is to delegate the whole of the business 
now consigned to committees of the whole House to small 
departmental committees, specially selected, sitting in suitable 
rooms "upstairs," and reporting to the House. in printed 
reports after careful deliberation. This, no doubt, has been 
done at times in what are known as "grand committees." 
But from their constitution and methods of work they have 
not been of very much use, nor have they materially relieved 
the House of its ordinary work in committee. The proposal 
now made is that at the opening of each session the House 
should nominate as many standing committees as there are 
separate ministerial departments, say finance, foreign affairs, 
army, navy, education, local government (or possibly, agri- 
culture, post, and railways), law, home, Scotland, Ireland, 
Colonies, India — that is, at least twelve or fourteen standing 



PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE 245 

committees, each consisting of eleven or thirteen members, 
more or less. To one of such committees every Bill, or 
motion when passed by the House, would be referred for 
consideration. 

If the committees altogether absorbed 165 members, this 
would amount to one-quarter of the whole, and would so 
far set free the other three-fourths. It is not proposed that 
the committees should be selected by the Government, or 
by the majority, but by a system of proportional representa- 
tion. The incurable defects of proportional representation 
as applied to the parliamentary suffrage throughout the 
kingdom, or in separate constituencies, are these, that in a 
constituency of 10,000 or 15,000, those who agree in opinion 
have no adequate means of conferring and meeting; and, 
if they had, the masses of electors have no definite opinions 
cut and dried, and have no distinct choice of persons and 
policies ready formed to hand. The House of Commons 
is exactly the body where proportional representation could 
have a fair field and could be used with entire ease and success. 
It would be easy to apportion the members of the committees 
so as to give each party or group exactly the same proportionate 
strength in the committees that they hold in the House. If 
the total number of committee men were 165, a party that 
commanded two-thirds of the House could elect no; a group 
which numbered one-fifth could elect 33; a group which 
numbered one-tenth could elect 16; a group which numbered 
only twelve could elect 3. Every four M.P.'s could elect one 
committee man; and, by careful selection, the whole body 
of committees would be an exact mirror of the House. 

The twelve or thirteen committees should sit as committees 
on private Bills now sit, with power to call before them and 
examine any Minister in either House, to hear any M.P. 
who desired to address them, and to obtain information from 



246 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Government offices or elsewhere. They should have power 
to sit at convenient hours whether the House were sitting 
or not, and even to meet when it was not in session. If they 
had power to summon and examine any Minister, they would 
be able to exercise a control which the House itself has long 
lost. Such a power would necessarily imply the right to sit 
at need with strictly closed doors; and, in the case of such 
committees as those on foreign affairs, army, or navy, the 
members of them might be sworn in as privy councillors, 
and deliberate with the secrecy and the responsibility of a 
Cabinet. 

A small committee, not in any case exceeding fifteen, sit- 
ting in camera, if it chose, with no persons present but those 
specially summoned, could give a thorough examination to 
every clause of any Bill, especially if it could summon to 
assist it the legal and official servants of the State. The right 
to examine and even cross-examine any Minister, principal 
or subordinate, whether peer or commoner, would really 
make the answering serious and responsible questions an 
important duty, and would obviate the resort to a miscellane- 
ous and idle system of public questions which never receive 
honest or complete answers. It does not follow that every 
piece of information obtained in committee need be made 
public, or even reported in express terms to the House. But 
the committee would make their report with full and accurate 
knowledge of all necessary facts. As things now are, the 
House has to pass Bills and clauses without more knowledge 
of facts than it suits the Minister to disclose, and in the 
absence of the draftsmen and lawyers who alone can enhghten 
it on the effect of the intricate verbiage of a Bill. The proper 
chairman of each committee would be the Minister, principal 
or subordinate, for that department. 

When the committee had fully considered its Bill, the 



PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE 247 

chairman would submit to the House a printed report con- 
taining the conclusions of the committee or of the majority, 
with reasons and, if necessary, tables of returns or legal 
opinions obtained. The minority could add their own report, 
and any member could raise a new point when the report was 
before the House. It is obvious how greatly superior in con- 
venience and business efficiency would be such a course of 
patient study of clauses, with expert advice, as compared 
with the rough and tumble of committees of the whole House, 
where intricate clauses are tossed about from side to side in 
a noisy House, with one or two hundred members chatting, 
sleeping, running in and out, not one in ten having an idea 
what is the immediate business. 

The way in which Acts of Parliament are hatched has long 
been the scandal of our constitution, the despair of business 
men, and the insoluble puzzle of the law courts. The Legis- 
lature is found to have said things it never meant to say, and 
to have left unsaid that which it intended. Who can be sur- 
prised? A Minister, with his draftsmen, has prepared an 
elaborate Bill full of technical details which he himself under- 
stands most imperfectly, and which the ordinary M.P. does 
not understand at all. They have been wrangling for hours 
over clauses. A few men on the Opposition side, with expert 
knowledge, press for amendments which favour their own 
interest. The Minister cannot meet them with equal readi- 
ness. His supporters are tired, puzzled ; they have ladies on 
the terrace, or they cannot be got away from dinner-parties, 
dances, or theatres. The whip gets anxious, and whispers 
that he thinks the troublesome people must be squared. A 
hurried draft of concession or compromise is prepared, without 
time for due consideration or expert advice as to its working. 
The opposition is "placated"; the Minister saves his credit 
by the skin of his teeth ; the Bill becomes law ; and the public 



248 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

smarts under some fresh miscarriage of justice or administra- 
tive knot. 

This is no exaggerated picture of legislative methods. 
Ministers, officials of all kind, permanent secretaries of de- 
partments, draftsmen, lawyers, judges are all agreed that it 
is a system of miserable impotence and confusion. They 
struggle against it ; and by energy and self-sacrifice stave off 
some of the worst consequences. But they have to endure 
many of its evils in silence. The evils are absolutely inevitable 
so long as Parliament persists in the obsolete system of settling 
the intricate details of long Bills in committees of the whole 
House, which necessarily become either a scramble with 
varying chances, or else are passed mechanically without 
consideration at all by arbitrary guillotine. The House 
would never have endured such a method so long, had it not 
been that Mr. Gladstone revelled in argumentative tussles 
where he had no rival or match; and in Mr. Balfour's time 
the majority acquiesced in automatic closure by compart- 
ments, calmly abdicating all the duties of a House of 
Commons. 

It would pass the wit of man to devise any plan whereby 
a complicated Bill of 150 clauses could be settled in an as- 
sembly of 200 to 300 persons, moving up and down, in and 
out, three-fourths of them busy with other things, and not 
one in ten able to follow the discussion without expert advice 
and printed materials before them. Many a ministerial Bill 
is as complicated and technical as some private Bills pro- 
moted by a railway or a corporation. But who would dream 
of sending a Bill for a new branch line, or a gas or water 
Bill, to be settled by the whole House in loose order? Yet 
this has to be done with many a public measure of infinitely 
more importance than any railway or gas Bill. 

If the whole of the business now muddled over in committee 



PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE 249 

of the whole House were relegated to special standing com- 
mittees sitting in proper chambers "upstairs," it is obvious 
that an immense saving of time would be effected, and also 
a great acceleration of legislative output. As things now 
stand, one large contentious Bill, at most two or three such 
Bills, are the utmost any Government can succeed in pushing 
through in the weary seven months between January and 
September. Sometimes a ridiculous little Bill, like the sham 
Aliens Bill of 1905, blocks the way and drags on week after 
week, ending in mere flourishes and wanton mischief. So, 
too, the hollow Unemployed Bill ended in a nauseous kind 
of smoke. And the late Government plaintively wailed out 
that they could not proceed with large and urgent measures 
because, in fact, they were choked with their own smoke. 
Why this deadlock? Because a Bill, even a bogus Bill, 
meant as a vulgar election cry, or a sham Bill designed to 
meet an awkward demand, has to be tossed about, like a foot- 
ball in a scrimmage, in a full House which gives every facility 
for bimkum and obstruction, and yet in which no serious 
business can be taken up until the scrimmage has kicked 
itself off the field. 

Real working committees would sit, of course, simultane- 
ously, not necessarily all at the same hour, or even on the 
same day; but there would be no reason why eight or ten 
serious Bills might not be considered in the same session, 
just as eight or ten private Bills now are considered day by 
day in different rooms. Between January and April eight 
or ten measures could have been in due order reported to the 
House. The House, of course, would not be bound by the 
finding of the committee. It might reject the whole scheme 
once for all, or it might return it to the committee for re- 
consideration, with any "instruction" or comment. The 
point would be that the whole House would not attempt the 



250 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

impracticable and mischievous task of trying to do the work 
of committee in a miscellaneous scramble of 200 or 300 mem- 
bers, many of whom have neither special knowledge of the 
business, nor particular interest in it, unless perhaps to worry, 
obstruct, or advertise themselves. 

The House — once relieved of the weary work of passing, 
in unwieldy meetings of a desultory kind, interminable strings 
of technical clauses, relieved of the idle worry of trumpery 
"questions," the moving for "returns," nomination of com- 
missions, etc., all which purely departmental business would 
go to the proper departmental committee, not to the full House 
— would get rid of sources of delay, trifling, and solicitation. 
All need or excuse for prolonged public sittings would be 
at an end. Sittings from 2 p.m. to midnight, even with a 
break, and still occasionally prolonged to the small hours of 
the morning, are utterly irrational and destructive of true 
legislation. They exhaust Ministers ; they encourage loung- 
ing in and out; they make the whole atmosphere of the 
place desultory and unreal. The average man does not 
keep his mind on the stretch upon the same business for more 
than four or five hours to any useful result. When the House 
sits for eight, ten, or twelve hours, even with a dinner interval, 
the practice grows up for ordinary members to drop in once, 
or it may be twice, making up four or five hours of actual 
attendance at debate. The ordinary member may spend 
three or four more hours somewhere within reach. But the 
professional or the "smart" M.P. is satisfied if he can put 
in an appearance in debate of an hour or two in the course 
of the week, and turn up in time to vote when he has received 
' a three-line whip.' All this make-believe of being a legislator 
is encouraged and almost excused by prolonging the sittings 
to ten hours, which is far more than flesh and blood, body and 
bones, can bear. 



PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE 25 1 

This scandal can only be removed by making the public 
sittings of the House half as long — say, four to five hours — 
but ensuring that these shall be sittings of real continuous 
work. If this limit were observed, and the House rose at 
7 P.M. (and never sat later than 10 p.m.) members could be 
required to attend regularly ; the division lists and perhaps 
even attendances could be recorded and published; and 
constituencies could know next morning where their member 
had been. But public sittings of five hours could only be 
secured by relegating the whole business now done in com- 
mittee of the whole House to departmental committees sitting 
simultaneously " upstairs." In county councils and in most 
deliberate bodies it is the rule to require members attend- 
ing to enter their names in the register of the day, and a 
wholesome rule it is. M.P.'s who are proud to have their 
names recorded at a public dinner or a great society "crush" 
would find their energies stimulated if their attendances 
at St. Stephen's crush received the same publicity. The 
mischief is that the old superstition of eighteenth century 
gentlemen still survives, that the House of Commons is an 
aristocratic club, not the engine-house of a mighty empire, 
burdened with the hard lives of countless millions who toil 
and cry for help. 

It will be said that the method of special or select com- 
mittees has been tried, and with no great result. But "grand 
committees" have usually been far too large, and selected 
only to gratify friends or to "placate" opponents; and they 
often admit the very men who give most trouble. The 
wreckers of Bills may be heard, but they are not the right 
persons to decide on the issue. Permanent standing com- 
mittees, carefully chosen by the whole House, and in fact 
an authentic mirror of it, with the Minister or his deputy 
in the chair, would be free from many of the evils which 



252 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

neutralise the work of "select" committees. And when these 
select committees had reported, the old machinery had still 
to be gone through, so that the result was too often waste of 
time as well as futile labour to all concerned. There would 
be no difficulty in adding a qualified member occasionally 
to a committee, or in members exchanging from one to an- 
other. If a Minister were chairman of a committee, and it 
were thought essential to examine him for information, the 
chair would be taken for the time by a deputy-chairman, 
nominated for the occasion. A special select committee 
might even be formed to hold occasional or emergency sittings 
during the recess. On some such plan as this every foreign 
parliament, every county council, every company, bank, or 
public institution does its work. The British House of 
Commons, alone of modern chambers, tries to settle com- 
mittee details in a fluid crowd, where garrulity, obstruction, 
and desultory habits have forced ministers to resort to the 
scandal of "closure by compartments." 

Any such scheme of standing departmental committees 
involves the surrender of the whole of the work of Private 
Bill legislation. The system on which railways, corpora- 
tions, and companies obtain their Acts may not be so rife as 
it once was of glaring scandals, but it is still an anomaly 
charged with mischief and hardship. It survives, just as the 
trial of election petitions by the House itself survived, owing 
to powerful vested interests, and the jealousy of Parliament 
not to part with any of its privileges. Landlords and capital- 
ists in Parliament struggle to keep all dealings with property 
under their own eye, and they shrink from giving outside 
authorities judicial and legislative powers. But they will 
have to do so. The civilised world can offer no spectacle 
of " how-not-to-do-it " more grotesque than the sight of a 
committee-room in the Lords sitting on a complicated Bill 



PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE 253 

promoted by a great railway or a corporation. The room is 
hrnig with plans, sections, huge tabulated schedules, or 
engineers' models. Great lights of science are examined by 
consummate masters of every forensic art. Expert witnesses 
(the "d — d liars" of a great judge) are heard day by day 
to expound mysteries which only a trained professional can 
follow. The evidence would fill a Blue-book and costs 
;^iooo a day. All this time the chairman (usually a man 
of sense and experience) does his best to follow the discussion, 
and he gets a fair notion of what the main points are. By 
his side sits a master of fox-hounds yawning; a weather- 
beaten colonel picks his teeth; a dandy writes answers to 
"smart" invitations; and a young guardsman works out 
calculations in his betting-book. After three weeks of this 
dreary farce, when ;^2o,ooo have been sunk, my lords find 
that the preamble is passed. 

If this putrescent scandal of Private Bill legislation were 
done away, the rooms, staff, and machinery upstairs would 
be set free, and the call on members' time and labour im- 
mensely reduced. Committees — the permanent departmen- 
tal committees — would meet at lo a.m. for two or three 
hours' sitting, three-fourths of the House being free from 
attendance altogether. There would then be ample time 
for a sitting of the House itself, of four or five hours — say, 
from 2 P.M. to 7 P.M. Abolish night sittings altogether, 
excepting for some urgent occasion for one or at most two 
hours, but always rising before midnight. That is how all 
other parliaments, county councils, senates, boards of com- 
panies, and every business chamber in civilised countries do 
their work. There ministers get to work at 8 a.m. or even 
6 A.M. — sovereigns and autocrats abroad have to do it, 
to say nothing of the "strenuous" presidents of the West 
like Roosevelt and Diaz. British ministers retain the ob- 



254 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

solete habits of the Harleys, Walpoles, Pitts, and Norths 
of the eighteenth century, when men dined in the early after- 
noon, and supped, gambled, and gossiped at midnight. 

French statesmen, German, Italian statesmen, do not rush 
off to the Alps or the seaside for "week-ends" in the midst 
of session. Nor do bank and railway managers, chief clerks 
of great industries, run away from the office, every five or 
six days, for forty-eight hours or even a week. Those who 
are responsible for the tremendous concerns of the British 
Empire tear about the country, even in session, to Scotland 
or Cornwall, Cromer or Torquay, by rail or motor, as if 
they were travelling "bagmen" doing their trade round. 
And when a cabinet council is summoned noble, lords and 
right honourable gentlemen rush up to town, just as "bookies" 
gather in haste to a race meeting or a football contest. We 
pay British ministers ;^5ooo a year, without expecting them 
to "attend to the shop," as foreign ministers on a fifth of 
their salary have to do, as business managers on a tenth of it 
have to do. 

The excuse for this gad-about habit of British rulers is 
that, in the first place, they are country gentlemen and have 
to look after their estates; and in the next place, they are 
so much exhausted by parliamentary duties of ten or twelve 
hours a day, that they must refresh themselves with sport, 
golf, or house parties. Now, the temper of the new democ- 
racy is against paying the owners of great estates ;^5ooo a 
year, and it is in favour of requiring men who undertake 
public duties to stick to them. If ministers were obliged to 
sit in Parliament not more than four hours in a day, twenty 
to twenty-four hours a week, their health would gain, and 
they could prepare their Bills, compose despatches, and meet 
in council without any hurry or strain at all. Since one- 
fourth of the present M.P.'s do not own motors or even 



PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE 255 

carriages and cannot afford cabs at night, late sittings are 
a gross social injustice and offence. To reduce the hours of 
sitting in Parliament is the first condition of "efficiency" in 
Government — as it is also in legislation. 

The preposterous arrangement of sessions in the year is 
another scandalous survival of ancient custom, entirely due 
to habits of "sport," foreign touring, and "society functions." 
Parliament seldom meets till fox-hunting is ended, and by 
ancient superstition is supposed to rush off to kill grouse on 
the •12th of August. It goes to races, balls, Lord's, and 
courts, from April to July. Then it goes to the Highlands 
"globe-trotting," or country seats from August to February. 
A shameless neglect of duty. A serious business Parliament 
would arrange to hold sessions in all the four quarters of 
each year, as all business and professional men do. It would 
meet, say, in four sessions of eight weeks each, leaving 
twenty weeks for recess — perhaps a long summer recess of 
ten weeks and three others of three weeks each. 

Why Parliament should swelter in London during July, 
August, and even September, and then spend the autumn 
in the Highlands, and the winter killing vermin and poultry 
in the shires, bleak moors, and boggy woods, no one can say, 
unless that it suits sporting men, magnates, society queens 
and their daughters. No other Parliament behaves with such 
insolent indifference to public demands, and such eager 
care for its own pleasures. The needs of this vast empire 
do not vegetate or hibernate between August and February. 
They say, of course, that the ministers get on as well without 
Parliament, and indeed, very often, even better. But from 
August to February ministers also are scattered up and 
down the three kingdoms, hundreds of miles apart, and 
hundreds of miles away from their offices, permanent offi- 
cials, papers, and libraries. When a war breaks out, a 



256 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

revolution abroad or a riot at home, the minister telegraphs 
to a clerk in town to send down the more important papers 
to peruse in the country. 

The usual reply is that when the hot war of Parliament 
is over, and the Temple of Janus at Westminster is closed — 
the ecumenical Temple of Janus is very rarely closed — 
ministers require a close time to meditate and recruit. Were 
ministers and parliament men denied these indispensable 
holidays, great magnates, we are told, would hardly consent 
to sacrifice their ease by serving the State; great capitalists 
would not give us their financial experience; lawyers could 
not afford to assist the nation by their learning; and eldest 
sons would not gain the necessary training for public life. 
This is a dilemma which alarms the classes more than the 
masses. The latter simple folk cannot be brought to see 
why magnates, capitalists, men of fashion, and turfites 
should want to sit in the House of Commons at all. Perhaps 
the value of their assistance hardly compensates for the in- 
convenience that during six months on end the House of 
Commons is idle, and even the Government of the Empire 
is dispersed about the nation in a round of house parties, 
"local functions," and country amusements. 

This is not the place — nor is a mere outsider the man — 
to enter on many smaller, more or less material and formal, 
changes which are needed to make the House of Commons 
a really business chamber. The trouble comes from retain- 
ing forms inherited from the days of Plantagenet and Tudor 
kings. We submit to trammels fatal to serious work, be- 
cause they come down from the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
tury. The "Mother of Parliaments" is really the great- 
grandmother of parliaments in its old-fashioned furbelows. 
First of all comes the huge absurdity of meeting in a chamber 
which will not seat comfortably half the members, and 



PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE 257 

into which only three-fourths of them can be crushed at a 
pinch so as to hear worse than in the shilling gallery at a 
theatre. The inevitable result is that a third, or even half, 
of the members habitually stay away or lounge about the 
precincts. As the nation will not give them sitting room 
and hardly even standing room, it seems plain that the nation 
only expects them to look in by groups, and for special occa- 
sions. The first condition of a working House is a chamber 
wherein every one of the 670 can have his own seat. The 
indecent scramble for places, the silly trick of ticketing seats 
at midnight, the crowding the gangways and balconies 
as if it were the pit of a theatre, is utterly unworthy of a 
rational people and an Imperial Parliament. 

We all know why, when the Houses were rebuilt, the 
absurd narrowness of space was retained. Simply because 
the oblong form of the old thirteenth-century chapel of St. 
Stephen had to be preserved. All other parliaments, coun- 
cils, and large deliberative chambers have adopted the semi- 
circular form, which alone enables a body of some hundreds 
to see and hear each other. Half the waste of time, obstruc- 
tion, disorder, and lounging habits of the House of Commons 
is due to the fact that members have no places of their own, 
no room to sit, cannot be got into the House all together, 
and, when in it, can sleep on the back benches as quietly as 
in their own libraries. An oblong chamber that could seat 
670 members and the clerks and staff would only increase 
the difficulty of hearing, the noisy ways, and the opportunity 
of slumbering unseen. If the House of Commons often 
looks like a club smoking-room, the reason is that it has to 
squeeze itself into that Procrustes bed — the palace chapel 
of the Plantagenets. 

I hesitate to suggest how great a reform would be a time 
limit of speeches. Honourable members would regard that 



258 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

as worse than sacrilege. But the time limit for speeches 
at the London County Council has worked admirably. It is 
always extended by a vote whenever necessary. It never 
suppresses any serious argument, whilst it annihilates bores. 
Speakers avoid verbiage or repetition. The House listens 
to speeches which cannot last long, and will soon be answered 
from the other side. It gives life and point to every debate. 
It makes obstruction impossible. If in the last Parliament 
there had been a time limit for speeches, the late Government 
would have been beaten a dozen times over. Even Sir A. 
Acland-Hood could not have found relays of Hartleys and 
Flannerys. Twenty minutes, or at the utmost half an hour, 
is enough to enable the average speaker to say what he has 
to say. Indeed, it is very often found to be more than enough. 
A front bench speaker or the spokesman of any group or 
cause could always rely on the courtesy of the House to extend 
the limit on good cause shown. At the London County 
Council I have heard the time limit on a Budget opening 
extended four successive times by a general vote. A time 
limit of twenty minutes for ordinary speeches would do more 
to give life to Parliament and to reduce desultory habits 
than any other single form. 

I abstain from touching on some other reforms, trivial 
in themselves, but highly significant and not unimportant. 
Official costume, court dress, swords (swords in the twentieth 
century in a democratic Parliament !) , all this is a silly rem- 
nant of extinct manners, and now even a cause of offence. 
There are now at least 150 members to whom these badges 
of social classification are both ridiculous and odious. The 
men chosen and supported by barefoot Irish peasants and 
by British miners, spinners, and carpenters cannot afford 
these clothes and accoutrements, nor would they consent to 
appear in the guise of Lord Mayor's footmen or actors in 



PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE 259 

the School for Scandal. The age has outgrown this playing 
at the manners of Queen Anne. And the House of Com- 
mons, with some fifty workmen, eighty Nationalists, and a 
score or two more of men who were not bred at Eton and 
Oxford, and do not attend at levees or "At Homes," is a 
very different place from that in which members required a 
property qualification, and where Edmund Burke was held 
unworthy to enter a Cabinet. 

We all trust that, with the scandalous bonus given to the 
rich by the system of plural voting, there will disappear also 
the unjust and mischievous practice of prolonging a general 
election over several weeks. As in other countries, elections 
should be held throughout the four nations on the same day, 
which ought to be made a bank holiday. I would also 
prohibit the use of motors and carriages, unless actually 
occupied by their owner or his agents. The lavish use of 
vehicles to carry electors to the poll is a very squalid kind of 
bribery which ought to be suppressed like "treating" and 
"hired vehicles." We need not labour the payment of all 
bona fide election expenses with the House and the Govern- 
ment we now have secured. The antique paraphernalia of 
writs, returns, re-election on taking office, "swearing-in," 
and other mummery, will have to go. Nothing should 
prevent the Dissolution of Parliament by Royal Proclama- 
tion, and the holding of a general election on one given day, 
at any convenient day at a future and reasonable date. The 
mediaeval rules about dissolutions and elections, with the 
obsolete jealousy of the Crown which forces both into one 
Royal Proclamation, cause nothing but trouble and serve 
no useful end. The superstition that the British Constitu- 
tion, like Nature, "abhors a vacuum," and insists on the 
formula — Le Parlement est mart — Vive le Parlement I — 
is hardly -worthy of the twentieth century. 



26o REALITIES AND IDEALS 

The twentieth century is here. The ne-w democratic 
Parliament is also here. And 500 Liberal, Labour, and 
Nationalist M.P.'s will have to conform their practice to the 
new conditions, or the nation, at last roused to assert itself, 
"will know the reason why." 



PART II 
LITERATURE AND ART 



THE USES OF RICH MEN 

(From ''The Forum;' N.Y., 1893) 

Why do we not make a better use of our rich men? We 
waste them, and let them run to seed anyhow, a burden to 
themselves and a nuisance to the public. We ought to utilise 
them, and make citizens of them, lifting them from their 
condition of ineptitude and degradation to become respect- 
able members of the commonwealth. Like the tides, the 
sun, or the negro race, they could do a great deal of useful 
work, if they were properly turned to it. As it is, we let 
their vast motive power run to waste, like the waters at 
Niagara, in noise and foam. 

They are not bad fellows — at least not all of them. 
Many of them are really anxious to do something, and to 
become decent citizens. They bore themselves intolerably; 
and are grateful to any one who will show them how they 
can do something that men will care for, or how to spend their 
money in ways that cannot be called either selfish or mean. 
Many a man who has inherited millions is gnawed with envy 
as he watches a practical man turning an honest penny. 
How he would like to earn an honest penny ! He never did : 
he never will ; and he feels like a dyspeptic invalid watching 
a hearty beggar enjoying a bone or a crust. 

Many a rich man is capable of better things; but he does 
not know how to begin. The one thing that his wealth 

263 



264 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

cannot buy is — an appetite, the zest for useful work, the 
consciousness of being a worker in the hive, and not a drone. 
A Parisian viveur, whose dinner occupied him three hours 
each night at Bignon's, was once watching sadly a young 
English tourist eating his first square meal after six weeks' 
climbing in the Alps. "Ah!" said the epicure with a sigh, 
"if one could only sit down to pdfe defoie gras with a moun- 
tain appetite ! " But that is their mistake. It is the ioujours 
perdix — toujours pate de foie gras — which robs them of 
appetite, of zest, of the love of work. But it is not too late. 
Much may be done by a proper regimen. And I propose to 
show that there are still ways in which a rich man — even a 
very rich man — may yet become useful and happy. 

The ancients managed this matter much better than we 
do. At Athens and in many other Greek republics there 
was a remarkable institution known as the AeiTovpyiM, 
Liturgies, that is, public services of rich men. In Christian 
times the word became limited to a religious service, or public 
worship; and hence the word Liturgy now means a form of 
congregational prayer, or ritual of divine service. But in 
ancient times, and originally, the word and the thing had a 
far wider meaning. And we might learn a useful lesson by 
restoring the ancient republican Liturgy, or costly public 
service offered to the State by rich men. 

At Athens the Liturgies were legal and constitutional 
offices, imposed periodically and according to a regular 
order, by each local community on citizens rated as having 
a capital of more than a given amount. They were special 
taxes on the conspicuous rich men, originally imposed as the 
equivalent of peculiar privileges and rights; just as a feudal 
barony, with its powers and revenues, implied the obligation 
of military and civil service and the maintenance of an armed 
force, police, and justice. But when democratic equality 



THE USES OF RICH MEN 265 

was established at Athens, the special taxation of the rich 
was maintained and largely increased. 

It was not a simple tax; it was not unpopular; it was no 
sordid affair of money. It always remained a public service, 
an honorary distinction, a coveted office, a duty to be filled 
by taste, skill, personal effort, and public spirit. Rich men 
contended for the ofhce, greatly exceeded their legal liability, 
often ruined themselves in their zeal, and sometimes gained 
so dangerous an influence by their magnificence, that Aristotle 
in his Politics warns the democracies of the risk. But much 
of the artistic and intellectual pre-eminence of Athens was 
due to this favourite institution. We have suffered this noble 
custom to die out. We leave our millionaires in their sordid 
impotence. Financial reformers talk big about a mere 
mechanical progressive income-tax. Mr. Joseph Chamber- 
lain made some brave speeches about "Ransom." But the 
true ransom is the revival of that noble republican institu- 
tion, the Liturgies of the Rich. 

The Athenian Liturgies were for very varied purposes. 
As magistrates and ministers certain men of wealth were 
charged with the cost and production of the public dramas, 
choruses, processions, games, embassies, and feasts. In 
time of war, they were called on to man and arm a ship for 
the fleet. But almost the whole of the public amusements, 
religious and artistic ceremonies, were provided freely for 
the people at the cost and by the personal efforts of selected 
men of wealth. We owe the tragedies and comedies of the 
great poets to the munificence of these wealthy patrons. 
The temples, statues, and monuments with which Athens 
was crowded were mainly the gifts of public benefactors. 
One street was named from the tripods which the Choragi 
had won as prizes for success in their Liturgy, and the lovely 
monument of Lysicrates was dedicated to enshrine such a 



266 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

prize. The legal institution developed into an honoured 
custom, whereby the chief ambition of a rich man came to 
be that of making splendid gifts to his fellow-citizens. 

Theatres, race-courses, temples, baths, aqueducts, gardens, 
libraries, academies, colonnades, pictures, statues, books, 
and museums — all were showered upon favoured cities by 
wealthy men who possessed or who coveted the name of a 
citizen. Herodes Atticus was no hero: but to this day the 
traveller at Athens is reminded of the pubHc spirit of old 
times by the stupendous remains of his gifts to his native 
city — perhaps the most lavish munificence of a private 
person recorded in history. Twenty millions to-day would 
not suffice to pay for the public works which were presented 
to Greece by this very useful rich man. The Romans car- 
ried out the system of Liturgies on a scale even vaster, but in 
a spirit far less pure. With the Romans it was not so much 
honour as ambition which suggested their munificence; rich 
men sought power rather than immortality ; they gave 
gladiatorial shows and baths, rather than libraries and 
tragedies. In Mediaeval times, public munificence was 
confined to churches and religious offerings. It is the 
artistic Liturgy of republican Athens which we should seek 
to restore. 

In this matter the United States are far ahead of the rest 
of the civilised world ; but, even in America, the practice is 
quite in its infancy. Prominent citizens in some of the most 
advanced States have made to the public splendid gifts of 
libraries, museums, and colleges. It is an excellent beginning 
which has shown the Old World the virtue of the republican 
spirit. In Europe there is as yet but little of the kind. In 
England, mainly in the Midlands and in the North, something 
has been done — but exclusively by traders and men of 
business. The way has been shown by Anglo-Americans, 



THE USES OF RICH MEN 267 

such as Mr. Peabody and Mr. Carnegie. We have our 
Masons and our Edwardses. Once or twice a rich trades- 
man or a manufacturer has presented the nation or his native 
town with a collection of pictures, a museum, a library, a 
college, or even a park. It is a striking fact that these noble 
examples of public spirit have been given amongst us almost 
without exception by obscure middle-class men, whose wealth 
no man suspected, whose generosity was a surprise even to 
their neighbours, and whose munificence is usually accepted 
with a chilly and even ungracious civility. 

The class which is most conspicuously wanting in this 
form of public spirit is the most conspicuous class now extant 
as a class in the whole world — the English aristocracy of 
hereditary wealth. Of all rich men they are the only power- 
ful order which, outside their own estates, never give the pub- 
lic anything — except their formal subscriptions to hospitals 
and the like. In the way of munificence — nothing. One 
can hardly recall a single instance of a great peer or great 
landowner giving the public anything from their millions. 
Their idea of public munificence is to display their splendid 
selves. Their noble example to the people is to exhibit 
their own luxury and extravagance. The only form of 
Liturgy they recognise is the admission of the people to 
witness the stateHness of their own lives. They build palaces 
— to Hve in themselves; they have parks, picture-galleries, 
libraries, and collections, which they keep up rather for pride 
than for any personal pleasure in them ; and which the public 
are admitted to stare at one day in the week (when the family 
are away) at half-a-crown a head. 

No doubt, the obsolete law of entail, and the obsolescent 
tradition of "keeping up the family place," account for 
much of this. They devote large sums, it is true, to improve 
and develop their estates. But they often inherit enormous 



268 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

fortunes in other forms, and marriage, minorities, and the 
growth of towns, from time to time throw into their laps heaps 
of ready money. All this goes in race-horses, yachts, orchids, 
deer-forests, and entertainments — but not one penny to the 
public. The public are allowed to look on from a proper 
distance. They can see the horses race, the yachts sail; 
they may not look at the orchids or the deer, but, when a 
concert or ball is given, they may stand in the gutter and 
watch the carriages drive up to the choragus^ door. This 
sublime self-devotion of the rich aristocrat is imitated from 
the royal caste. In ancient times kings and emperors every- 
where made splendid gifts to the people, and almost the whole 
of the public enjoyments in the Roman Empire were pre- 
sented by the Caesars, their family, ministers, or officials. 
Now, kings and emperors receive — even tout for — presents, 
but never give. The aristocrats are only too ready to learn 
the new version of noblesse oblige. They give only to them- 
selves. It is treat enough for the public to be suffered to 
see them enjoying themselves. 

America shows us examples of a very different spirit. 
There are plenty of towns in the United States which are 
crowded with buildings and institutions freely presented by 
rich citizens to the public. America is fortunate in never 
having known on its soil the poisonous seed of feudal entail 
and privileged orders. Nor is the American people so eager 
as are the vulgar in Europe to gaze at a luxury which they 
are not allowed to share. When rich men in America 
squander fortunes on themselves, they have little opportunity 
for personal ostentation or feudal pomp; and they can 
hardly persuade themselves that their extravagance is a 
civic duty and a public boon, as princes and nobles in Europe 
are taught to do. But even in America there is much to be 
done to show the social justification of great wealth. The 



THE USES OF RICH MEN 269 

donors of libraries, museums, and colleges, do not come as a 
rule from the ranks of the most conspicuous millionaires, 
and the proverbial "gold-bugs" are often conspicuous for 
their absence from the noble roll of public benefactors. 
We are told in Europe that these gilded coleoptera are dying 
of ennui and auriferous plethora. Why do they not show 
their fellow-citizens how to form a grand gallery of art, 
how to create a high-class theatre, how to found a great 
scientific museum? 

There is almost no limit to the forms in which rich men 
could be of use if they tried, and to the public benefactions 
they could confer if they put their minds to it. Such grand 
institutions as the Cooper Institute or the Lick Observatory 
are an honour to the people amongst whom such splendid 
examples of public spirit are common. But let us say a word 
for that rarer form of munificence which we saw to be estab- 
lished as a regular system at Athens. That is the artistic 
rather than the scientific or educational form of public 
endowments. We need hardly say more as to the vast service 
to the community conferred by the foundation of a library 
or a college. It is obvious and familiar. Words can make 
it no clearer, nor could they heighten the public sense of 
benefit. The artistic benefaction is not so familiar, and is 
more in need of recommendation and encouragement. No 
millionaire ever seems to think of giving his fellow-citizens 
a series of free musical entertainments, a historic pageant, 
much less a free dramatic performance. 

All the great dramas of antiquity, the tragedies of iEschylus 
and Sophocles, the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander, 
the lyric choruses, the sacred dances, and processional 
festivals, were all without exception the gifts of rich men to 
their fellow-citizens; no man bought his seat, no man was 
shut out, no one was expected to contribute. When iEschylus 



270 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

vanquished Phrynichus, or Sophocles won the prize from 
Euripides, the victory was decided not by the money taken at 
the doors, nor by the number of nights that the CEdipus was 
"run," but by the voice of trained judges. And the rich 
choragus, who had lavished his wealth in mounting the 
Prometheus or the Antigone, was amply repaid by the honour 
of having shown the public a masterpiece in a worthy setting. 
The tripod he carried home on success (the very bill for 
which was included in his outlay) remained as a sacred 
heirloom to his descendants. 

There are certain forms of art-culture which no state and 
no municipality, however rich and liberal, can ever provide 
for itself out of its public revenues. Town halls, senate 
houses, public offices, even libraries and museums, may be 
raised out of public funds by popular vote. But reasonable 
economy, or at least strict business value for the sums voted, 
will be, and ought to be, considered. The highest forms of 
art, which it is the duty of the best civilisation to present 
as types to all citizens, have no market price at all. They 
are above price; and, in order to produce their moral and 
social effects, they ought to be treated as outside of all eco- 
nomical conditions. How is a state or a town to obtain a 
collection of ancient masters, of priceless Raffaelles and 
Titians ? Where is it to buy a Louvre or a Vatican ? Who 
would vote the people's money to make another Versailles? 
Good or bad, the palaces, picture galleries, collections of 
antiquities, gardens and parks of Europe, have been created 
by princes and by them ceded to the State. The age of 
princes is practically over in the West, where they retain here 
and there the form and style of sovereignty, but nowhere its 
real functions and powers. But the age of rich men is not 
at all over. On the contrary, they are richer than ever, and 
the means of providing the public with splendid art and noble 



THE USES OF RICH MEN 27 1 

enjoyments has passed from princes into the hands of mill- 
ionaires. The millionaires have the means ; and they alone 
have it ; but as yet they miserably fail to recognise their part. 

The day may come when the world will have agreed to 
abolish rich men altogether as an obsolete institution. And 
certainly no anarchist or communist is working so desperately 
to hurry on that day as are the rich men themselves. The 
day, too, may come when the people will have so much taste, 
public spirit, and passion for the beautiful, that they will be 
ready to lavish their public revenues on artistic masterpieces. 
Something of the kind may be observed in France, and 
perhaps in Italy. In France it is understood that the State 
and the municipalities will buy pictures, statues, gardens, 
galleries, and fountains with a free hand out of the people's 
taxes, and will build palaces and halls, subvention theatres, 
and provide splendid spectacles for the people from national 
and civic funds. The result is that, in France, no private 
person ever gives the public anything, and that public money 
is spent on works of art with what would be called wanton 
extravagance in England and America. Here, and generally 
amongst a Protestant race of Saxon origin, it is not our way 
to provide beautiful things out of public money with that 
princely magnificence which many beautiful things require. 
An English-speaking race is economical, business-like, and 
jealous of anything like aesthetic extravagance. Nay, the 
strong Puritan element in English and American communities 
has stirrings of conscience against any form of art but that 
which is very narrow and quite conventional. It is hopeless 
to expect that, for many a long day, the higher forms of art 
will be adequately provided for the people in any English- 
speaking country by public funds voted by popular bodies. 

Here is the chance for rich men to cut in and supply a 
"felt want." For the present at any rate, we have got the 



272 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

rich men, and a field lies open to their energies, in which no 
competition is possible. English and American tax-payers 
will not pay the sums required by the truly noble forms of 
art. Art for the people is accordingly driven by the compe- 
tition of the market to its more vulgar forms ; and the civili- 
sation of the age is pro tanto debased. The role of the rich 
man is to show his fellow-citizens what taste, energy, and 
generosity can do. The Midases of the railway and money 
"hells" are not supposed to possess any quality of these three 
but the second. But the men of hereditary wealth in Eng- 
land claim to have a monopoly of the first, if not of the third ; 
and there is now in America a large order of men having 
inherited fortunes who value themselves on a culture and 
refinement quite unique and incommunicable. We are told 
that the old Faubourg St. Germain and the historic prin- 
cipii of Rome do not furnish an order more plainly superior to 
their fellow-citizens and more cruelly condemned to enforced 
indolence by the impossibility of entering the vulgar turmoil 
of "politics." Here then is a career of public usefulness 
marked out for the American citizen who combines in him- 
self wealth, leisure, and the higher culture. 

The only chance of a really great and elevating theatre 
is to carry it on without regard to direct profit. Recently 
Lord Tennyson's Foresters was tried in London but found 
no public encouragement. Regarded as a "woodland 
masque" and nothing more, it was sufficiently dramatic 
to sustain the lyrical poetry, bright music, and graceful 
tableaux of the piece. Though not a stirring play, it was a 
work of art as a lyrical interlude. But the British public 
would have none of it, preferring any rowdy nonsense or 
vapid melodrama. In Paris the principal theatres are under 
State patronage and have public subventions. That is out 
of the question in England or America. No great historic 



THE USES OF RICH MEN 273 

theatre was ever long maintained in its perfection on strict 
commercial lines. The day may come when the public will 
pay the value of a truly beautiful creation ; but the day is 
far off. The world would never have had the Agamemnon 
and the (Edipus, the Birds, and the Clouds, if the citizens of 
Athens had had to pay ten drachmas for a seat, and if ^Es- 
chylus and Sophocles had had to watch the till anxiously 
every night. But the same principle holds good of music, 
the opera, the orchestra of every kind. All the great in- 
strumental pieces of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wag- 
ner were aided by wealthy patronage ; and they would never 
have been produced at all, if they had solely depended on the 
money taken at the doors. It was a very bad form of patron- 
age, full of evils and humiliations of its own. No one would 
wish to revive such a system; and indeed it never can be 
revived. The age of the Waldsteins, Lobkowitzes, and 
Prince Archbishops has passed away. But the general rule 
holds good. The greatest things in music have never been 
produced on mere commercial lines. And they are even less 
likely to be produced now. 

Music, the drama, with all other art, having been handed 
over to the entrepreneur and the competition of the market, 
tempting profits have been offered to the artist, but only 
under conditions which tend to lower the art. A brilliant 
musical performer may make a rapid fortune, but only on 
condition of singing or playing in a hall so large that no one 
can hear him properly, whilst his performance tends more 
and more to display and not to art, and so that he is worked 
like a crack race-horse and boomed like a quack pill. A 
famous tragedian is expected to run round the world exhibit- 
ing himself to audiences without a grain of training or judg- 
ment, who go to see him in the same spirit that they go to 
see a dwarf or a woolly horse. Monster concerts, leviathan 



274 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

programmes, one man on one instrument performing for 
four hours to an audience of ten thousand persons ; a woman 
singing show pieces to thirty thousand people in an iron shed ; 
professional puffery; the "star" playing with a company of 
walking dummies — are the inevitable result of the com- 
mercial system. It ruins the artist and degrades the art. 
In the course of thirty years I have watched how many of 
the finest artists in Europe have gone all to pieces after a 
tour round the world. Their methods before and after a 
successful tour are as much contrasted as the signatures of 
Guido Fawkes "before and after torture." Unhappily, it 
is not only they but their art which has gone to pieces. The 
profits and the business of the artist have been put upon 
such a footing that, if art is to pay at all, it has to submit to 
the manager's conditions; and these are necessarily such as 
are the ruin of high art. 

In this dilemma our only resource is the rich man — the 
man who combines wealth, judgment, taste, and public 
spirit. He must put aside the bad and vulgar ways of the 
old-fashioned patron, who patronised for his own enjoy- 
ment or more usually from pride. There could not be a 
better model than the Athenian choragus of the best period, 
who was himself keenly ambitious of the prize of public 
honour, who looked upon himself as the business manager 
of the artist for the love of the art, and felt the same interest 
in his success as the squire took in the victory of the knight 
In the lists. It is not necessary to add that, of course, the 
legal obligation of the old republican Liturgy is not a thing 
to be revived in our age. If wealth is ever specially taxed 
in our times, it will be for all public purposes and not for 
incidental purposes of art. Until we recover the art passion 
which animated Athenians in their glorious times, we could 
hardly expect that a class-tax imposed by law would be 



THE USES OF RICH MEN 275 

popular. But there is all the more reason for voluntary 
discharge of these honourable duties. 

There has hardly ever been an age when less is offered 
to the public in this form than is the custom in our own age. 
During the whole of antiquity the entire art education of 
the people and their amusements, spectacles, and luxuries, 
were provided for them freely by the wealthy. During the 
whole of the Mediaeval period, vast resources were spent for 
the public benefit in the way of churches, religious offerings, 
ecclesiastical and academic endowments. The cathedrals, 
minsters, churches, were the gifts of the rich, and were them- 
selves free museums, galleries of art, musical halls, and 
even theatres. When the Mediaeval world ended, much 
was done of the same kind, but in less noble and munificent 
ways, by the kings, princes, courtiers, and grandees. In 
our age the possessors of hereditary wealth are mostly in- 
clined to spend it on themselves and their personal friends. 
Conspicuous examples of public munificence are left to 
obscure workers whose noble public spirit too often raises 
something akin to a sneer from the toadies of the great. 

At the end of my homily on "Liturgies" I am not about 
to enter at length on the question — Why should the rich 
make gifts to the public at all? This is a very wide and 
deep question which might carry us very far. It is enough 
for my present purpose to show that it has been recognised 
as a social, moral, and religious duty in all civilised times, 
and that it is still recognised in theory and from time to time 
practised in a way by many. The old republican conception 
of society was saturated with this principle as the antidote 
and compensation of glaring inequality amongst citizens. 
The Christian religion took it up as the corner-stone of 
its practice. The churches were incessantly repeating how 
God loveth a cheerful giver, and charged the rich that they 



276 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

be ready to give. Unhappily, this excellent advice took a 
very narrow and inadequate form, and has in our days been 
interpreted to mean a modest subscription to a church, hos- 
pital, or blanket club. And now, when the fervour of 
Christian charity is waning, and the zeal of giving half one's 
goods like Zaccheus is abated, there are very many rich 
men who never give at all, except what fashion dictates, 
and who entirely ignore the social obligation imposed on 
them by great wealth. Princes and grandees are more or 
less passing away as a social institution. The rich have 
succeeded to their powers; and they must remember that 
they have succeeded to their obligations. 

My own creed, on which this is not the time or place to 
enlarge, teaches me that in our industrial age all wealth is 
really the product of thousands working together in ways 
of which they are not conscious, and with complex and 
subtle relations that no analysis can apportion. The rich 
man is simply the man who has managed to put himself at 
the end of the long chain, or into the centre of an intricate 
convolution, and whom society and law suflfer to retain the 
joint product conditionally; partly because it is impossible 
to apportion the just shares of the co-operators, and partly 
because it is the common interest that the product should 
be kept in a mass and freely used for the public good. But 
this personal appropriation of wealth is a social convention, 
and purely conditional on its proving to be convenient. The 
great problem which the twentieth century will have seriously 
to take in hand and finally solve is this : — Are rich men 
likely to prove of any real social use — or will it be better 
for society to abolish the institution? For my own part, I 
see many ways in which they can be of use, and I earnestly 
invite them to convince the public of this before it is too 
late. 



THE USES OF RICH MEN 277 

P.S. 1908. — The fifteen years that have passed since this 
was written have given us, both in Britain and in America, 
many splendid examples of the spirit described in this essay. 
They are too conspicuous to need naming — but alas ! as 
yet they are found only amongst the captains of industry — 
those who have personally created capital, not amongst those 
who have inherited great wealth. 



II 

THE REVIVAL OF THE DRAMA 

{From ''The Forum;' N.Y., 1893) 

In that most fascinating of biographies — Moore's Life and 
Letters of Lord Byron — we read how the poet, then in the 
zenith of his powers, having exhausted every known sensa- 
tion, was thrown into dangerous convulsions by witnessing 
Alfieri's Mirra, in company with his beloved Guiccioli. The 
attack was so severe that he felt the effects for a fortnight. 
He had a similar fit when some years earlier he saw Kean 
as Sir Giles Overreach. Byron, with all his faults, was not 
a nincompoop; he valued himself, and with good reason, 
on his personal nerve. There can be little doubt that the 
seizure was genuine and uncontrollable, and it remains a 
signal instance of the power of great acting over a poetic 
nature. This power has been felt in all ages with varying 
intensity, though perhaps it is rather at an ebb in our own. 
And that, in spite of the greatly revived interest we all now 
take in the stage, and the great amount of money, thought, 
and learning which is devoted to the theatre both in Britain 
and in America. 

It is incontestable that our stage, as a whole, exhibits far 
higher standards of cultivation than did that of our fathers 
in the 'Forties. Those who can remember the English 
theatre of that time may wonder how they ever could sit 
out in patience the historical play, the "genteel" comedy, 
and the second-class melodrama of that epoch. The farces 

278 



THE REVIVAL OF THE DRAMA 279 

were good — very good : there were in Europe one or two 
consummate actors : and there was still surviving an experi- 
enced body of old play-goers who had seen the grandest act- 
ing of modern times. But the mise-en-schne, the attempt at 
historic setting, the "supers" and chorus, walking-gentlemen, 
lords and ladies, — all these were too painful to look upon. 

When we read the Life of Dickens, Macready's Memoirs, 
Charlotte Bronte's picture of Queen Vashti, or George H. 
Lewis' sensible little book on Acting, we get some sense of 
the relations of literature and the stage in the 'Forties, some 
idea of that tragic delirium which threw a great poet into 
convulsions in the generation preceding. But sixty years 
ago there were educated people outside Islington who told 
you that Phelps' Macbeth was grand, who believed firmly 
in Charles Kean's "revivals," in Gustavus Vasa Brooks' 
Richard III., and who never flinched under the cockney 
vulgarisms and the Tom-and- Jerry swagger of the "cour- 
tiers," the "Honourable Chawleses" and the Lord Veri- 
sophts, presenting what we were assured were the manners 
of high life. It makes one hot to remember what we could 
sit through in our raw youth. Certainly they do far better 
now. 

In the first place, the local and historical setting of a 
high-class play is now often a thing to enjoy and even to 
study. The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Henry VIII., 
and a score of Mr. Irving's pieces, have been a true pleasure 
to witness, supposing them to be mere tableaux without 
words. The stage at the Lyceum is too crowded, — the 
sense of wanton costliness in the costumes is unpleasant, and 
— and — but I will not finish the sentence — . Still, the 
general effect was that of a beautiful picture, regarded 
simply as a scene, and moreover of a true, consistent, and 
fairly accurate revival of a striking historic panorama. 



28o REALITIES AND IDEALS 

This is, I believe, the main achievement of our genera- 
tion in the improvement of the stage. Costumes, scenery, 
groupings, accessories, are real v^orks of art — and in the 
main are true, thoughtful, even learned. Ours is the real 
age of historic reproduction. We may take it as certain 
that, in the history of the world, there never was a time 
when the exact picture of distant ages and races was repro- 
duced with an illusion so complete. It is a very valuable 
mode of education, and might be carried much farther. 
Our revived Greek Plays can teach even scholars a good 
deal; and a historian might gain an idea from the mise-en- 
scene of Becket, even if we suppose the historian deaf, or 
otherwise unable to follow the Martyr's speeches. We live 
in an age especially great in the historic mise-en-schie, and 
we ought to be thankful. 

It is not only the stage decorations, costumes, scenery 
and historic realism which have greatly improved in the 
present generation. The rank and file, if they have not 
yet grown to be finished actors, no longer set our teeth on 
edge with excruciating vulgarisms and grotesque ignorance 
of the habits and speech of ladies and gentlemen. Accord- 
ing to Punch, young men of birth and breeding are now 
flooding the stage, and an actor or two is indispensable at 
a Duchess' tea-party. Whatever be the cause, the manners 
of the stage are greatly improved, especially in light comedy, 
and the ordinary "society" play. The difference between a 
"genteel comedy" in 1843 ^^^ one in 1893 is the difference 
between the servants' hall and the drawing-room. In farce 
they were then very good, and in melodrama sometimes 
effective enough. But in presenting the polite society of 
their own day, the utility men and women of fifty years ago 
spoke like valets and lady's maids, and had hardly any 
higher education outside their purely professional training. 



THE REVIVAL OF THE DRAMA 281 

We have changed all that. The company of a first-class 
English theatre have not yet reached that easy perfection 
of the Comedie Franj aise — say in Le Monde ou Von s^ennuie, 
or in La joie fait peiir ; but tone of voice, look, bearing, are 
not outrageously unlike those of real society ; and however 
much it falls short of fine acting, a modern comedy does not 
become an utter farce. Mr. Irving, Mr. Tree, Mr. Bancroft, 
and Mr. Kendal have accustomed us to see contemporary 
life presented on the stage of their theatres with a very fair 
approach to reality, and with perhaps little more of paint, 
"deportment," and false emphasis, than what is almost in- 
separable from footlights and boards — at least from English 
boards. [1893.] 

There is another significant change — on the whole a 
change for the better. The melodrama of the old Surrey 
and the old Adelphi, the dramatised tales of the Harrison 
Ainsworth period, which Nicholas Nickleby presented to the 
provinces, were indescribable burlesques of passion, adven- 
ture, and crime, as traditionally understood on the minor 
stage. An actor of parts would occasionally strike out from 
them a lurid flash of horror and agony, and there was a cer- 
tain rattle and ring about them, in spite of their gross ex- 
travagance. But as a whole they deserved the contempt to 
which our better taste and improved culture have consigned 
them. Their place has been taken by pure realism, the 
exact representation of familiar sights: a house on fire, a 
criminal court, a sweater's den, a soldier's street row, or a 
picnic on the river. Why crowds should pay their money 
to see on the stage a policeman, a guardsman, a fire-engine, 
a race- horse, and a coster's jackass, which they can see in 
the streets any day without paying at all ; why a city public 
should be delighted to see itself in a coloured photograph 
behaving just as it does outside, in the identical clothes, with 



282 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

identical animals, vehicles, and other properties, is a mystery. 
It is not art; it is not education; it is not fun. It is pure 
commonplace, and utterly dull. But it is harmless, and on 
the whole it is better than gross melodramatic rant. 

It is easy tlien to sum up the features wherein the English 
stage of to-day has made distinct advance upon the stage 
of the 'Forties and the 'Fifties in the nineteenth century. 
First and foremost comes the artistic and intelligent setting 
of great historic plays; next, the rank and file at the best 
theatres can present modern life with some fair resemblance 
to what we see in the world, and not in a coarse stage con- 
vention; lastly, the melodramas of the second and third 
class have replaced intolerable burlesque by photographic 
realism, which, however pointless and ugly, is neither de- 
praving nor absurd. These are distinct gains, but they are 
not gains of a very high order. They would hardly suffice 
to throw B\Ton into convulsions. Do they add appreciably 
to the incorporation of the higher theatre with the greater 
literature? Has our drama thereby become a substantive 
part, an essential, a beautiful part of our poetry and of our 
art? Does our modern stage feed, stimulate, and interpret 
the higher imagination in its best work? Is it a trivial 
amusement or a true civilising force? 

The question is a very fair one, but by no means easy to 
answer. During the whole period of Attic tragedy, during 
the whole period of Attic comedy, old, middle, and new, 
that is to say practically from the battle of ]\Iarathon to the 
Roman dominion, this was certainly true of the Greek 
theatre, that it was a civilising force. It was true of the age 
of Plautus, Terence, and even Seneca. It was true of the 
Passion-plays and Miracle-plays of the Middle Ages. It was 
true of the age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Dryden, and Con- 
greve. It was true of Garrick and Goldsmith, of the age 



IKE RZ\'IVAL or THZ DR.\iLA. 283 

of the Kembles, of Sheridan, of B}Ton. It was obviously 
so in the age of the Spanish drama and also in the age of 
Louis XiV. ; and it was so in the best age of the opera. It 
was so with Alfieri and with Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing. 
During almost even- great epoch of literar}- creation, the 
tragic and the comic genius have found an instinctive affinity 
with the drama, have given to the drama of their best, and 
have foimd inspiration in the stage. Ours is an age, we 
are constantly reminded, of splendid genius. Does that 
genius give as much to the drama, find as much in the 
drama, as in so many various phases of ci^Tlis^rlcn it was 
wont to do? 

Take our tragedies and great historical plays. They are 
certainly presented now with far greater knowledge, taste, 
and scenic art than perhaps at any former time. As tableaux 
z'k'ants,ihe best of them are nearly perfect. [1893. J Shake- 
speare would at last come to believe himseK to be a mighty 
poet (an idea which on earth never seems to have crossed 
his mind for an instant) if he could see Mr. Irving^ s Hamlet, 
Wolsey, Shylock, or Mary Anderson's Winter's Tale, or Mr. 
Benson's Midsummer Night's Dream, Mr. Tree's Merry 
Wives of Windsor — provided his ears had been carefuUy 
plugged with cotton wool. To the eye the effect is p^fect. 
But this is not enough. Is the acting of Shakespeare ade- 
quate to-day? To those who have seen really great acting, 
to those who have carefully studied the traditions of the 
stage, and who have heard from competent judges what 
Kean, Mrs. Siddons, ^liss O'XeiU, and Kemble were, the 
question has but one answer. For sixty or seventy years at 
least, no really great tragedian has ever been heard in Eng- 
lish. Those who sa-:v Rachel at her best in Phedre "-ave 
known what great tragic acting can be; and we might add 
perhaps Got at his best. Salvini in his Drime in OteUo, 



284 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Ristori at her best, in Rosmunda, and perhaps Sarah Bern- 
hardt, at her best, in Andromaque. But it must be remem- 
bered that all of these have been seen very far from at their 
best, and especially on a foreign stage to an unsympathetic 
audience very imperfectly understanding their language. 
Let us take as a standard of measurement — Rachel, between 
1 840-1 850, playing Phedre at her best to a French audience. 
That was consummate tragic acting. For seventy years no 
English tragedian has ever approached that standard. 

We all admire the thoughtfulness, the ingenuity, the 
varied accomplishments of Air. Irving, of the late Mr. 
Booth, and of Mr. Tree and of others who are certainly 
actors of great merit; and Mary Anderson, Ellen Terry^ 
Ada Rehan, Mrs. Langtry and the rest, are charming women, 
who at times touch a very sweet note. But when we come 
to measure our present tragic acting by a really high stand- 
ard, we cannot count a single man of the first rank, nor a 
single woman of the second. The result is that our tragedies, 
even the best on the best stage, remain spectacles — things 
to look at, things to think over, and to learn from — but 
they never touch such chords of feeling as Mirra and Sir 
Giles Overreach roused in Byron, nor even wring a tear or 
a sob from the most impressionable woman. We come 
away with several tips on archaeology and some new read- 
ings from the "second folio"; and we say "What a lovely 
costume she wore to-night !" — "How wonderfully he makes 
up for Hamlet!" — but we are happily spared convulsions 
which make us ill for a fortnight. We have grown out of 
such nonsense; we go on to a late "crush," and talk about 
it as we do of the Private View of the New Gallery. That 
is to say, a tragedy with us to-day is a refined form of enter- 
tainment, but is no longer a living well-spring of poetic life. 

Our average of culture in modern play and comedy is 



THE REVIVAL OF THE DRAMA 285 

very much higher, the whole scenic business is far better, 
and the insufferable "staginess" of forty years ago is purged 
out of us. But it would be rash to assert that the leading 
parts of tragedy, comedy, or farce are really better acted 
now. Those who remember all that Macready and Charles 
Kean did to make Shakespeare popular, all that Wigan and 
Matthews did for comedy, all that Robson and Keeley did 
for farce, will hesitate to assert that we have superior actors 
to-day. Our companies are far more educated; we put 
everything on the stage with infinitely greater art; we have 
suppressed a mass of vulgarity and bombast. But the lead- 
ing parts are not better filled than they were two generations 
ago. They still remain a whole class below the best con- 
temporary acting of the continent; and they cannot be 
named with the best English acting of the early years of 
this century, nor even judged by the standard which experi- 
enced play-goers now living have been taught to recognise 
as great art. 

All this is a very unpopular thing to say, and is sure to 
provoke even angry rejoinders. The heat of party politics 
is mild in comparison with the heat of affairs of taste. To 
disparage a man's favourite actor is an offence, we all know, 
worse than to doubt about his wife's style of dress, or the 
absolute sanitation of his house-drain. Many men, es- 
pecially of the younger generation and such as have had no 
opportunities of ever seeing the higher acting at all, cannot 
believe that what has given them so much pleasure can be- 
long to any but the highest type. And most young men now 
and then become the loyal liegemen of some fascinating 
actress, whom, in the delightful abandon peculiar to their 
age and condition, they take to be the equal of the terrific 
Rachel or the irresistible Sarah. It is the duty of the older 
generation and of the larger experience to correct their par- 



286 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

donable extravagances and their generous illusions; to insist 
on the permanent standards of all noble art, and the far- 
reaching importance of maintaining that art in all its re- 
action over life. 

The really important thing in the matter is the interaction 
of Literature, Art, and the Drama, using all three terms in 
their high sense as great civilising forces. Is the relation of 
poetry and the stage to-day all that it might be, all that in 
some ages it has been? Does the stage continue to add 
lasting works of real genius to our literature? Do our 
poets, our romancers, and thinkers work for the stage, draw 
from the stage? It was an event when the great poet of 
the Victorian age first, in his later period, produced an act- 
ing drama. He did so towards the close of his career, with 
some hesitation and distaste, and in just rivalry with the 
great poet of France. It cannot be said that his dramas 
hold any such place in his total work as do the dramas of 
Hugo in his work ; nor are Harold and Becket at all destined 
to hold such a place in English literature, as Hernani and 
Ruy Bias hold in French literature. In spite of the beautiful 
setting in which we witness Becket, and its own interest as 
poetry, the true Tennysonian will always rate In Memoriam, 
the Lyrics, and the Songs, as of vastly higher power. Tenny- 
son wrote for the stage late in his career, doubtfully and 
without adding to his established reputation. And except 
Tennyson, we have hardly a single example of any writer 
of "the front bench" of our literature who has produced a 
single acting drama that now holds the stage or is ever likely 
to do so. Browning, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Swin- 
burne, Lewis Morris, Buchanan and many others have 
written dialogues, lyrical dramas, and dramatic fantasias; 
but there is not one acting play among these pieces, nor has 
the stage of to-day ever coloured a line of them. 



THE REVIVAL OF THE DRAMA 287 

It is true that there are men of real ability who produce 
effective plays, and men of letters and of various powers 
who take a keen interest in the stage. But the vast bulk of 
our stage pieces are the work of playwrights rather than 
poets, and the severance of the purely literary and the the- 
atrical world is very marked. It would be difficult to find 
any age or any country where the severance had been so 
complete. In France the majority of men of letters have 
tried their hand at a play or two; and the stage contributes 
an important part to the national literature. 

What is the cause ? The most immediate cause is this — 
that the English stage of to-day, though sufficiently culti- 
vated to form an occasional entertainment, is not sufficiently 
alive to occupy the serious hours of men of "light and lead- 
ing." Men of light and leading never find their imagination 
set on fire by any really great acting on an English stage; 
and it rarely occurs to them that the imagination can achieve 
some of its noblest work on the stage and by the instrument 
of the drama. The late Laureate gave them a clear and 
brave example; but he was so unfamiliar with the whole 
dramatic business, that his example failed to encourage his 
poetic and literary compeers. Mr. Irving reminded him 
that the public loved its sensations rather vivid: and no 
one can doubt that Mr. Irving knew his public. 

England is not, never was, and perhaps never can be, 
the home of the greatest acting. A Garrick, a Kean, may 
appear once in a century. Just as a Shakespeare or a Goethe 
may. But Englishmen as compared with Frenchmen, Ital- 
ians, even with Germans and Hungarians and Poles, are 
not born actors, and, except in farce, with difficulty rise 
to what in Europe is counted sound mediocrity. In farce 
and in burlesque, we have always been strong; but that is 
not a form of art which easily allies itself to the higher imagina- 



288 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

tion. There are, moreover, special hindrances to great art, 
and these have been multiplied by railroads and all the 
mobility of recent habits. The capital is a nation in itself 
— and a nation which is always moving. The enormous 
extent of London makes it costly and troublesome to go to a 
theatre constantly, London again contains a vast floating 
population, which business and pleasure have drawn there 
for a few weeks or even days. This nomad body is as nu- 
merous as the whole population of a great city. It has 
abundant leisure in the evening, craves a little novelty and 
distraction, and is quite the reverse of critical. There is 
thus no permanent and trained audience in a London theatre. 
It is largely made up of casual elements from the provinces 
or the suburbs, who are not regular play-goers, who have a 
minimum of culture and are very easily pleased with a lively 
entertainment. 

Now the essential conditions of a really great theatre are: 
first, a permanent and trained audience; next, freedom from 
pecuniary anxieties and any temptation to get big houses 
by sensations and spectacles; and lastly, a vigorous, inde- 
pendent, and dominant school of criticism. The audience 
must come regularly and be perfectly familiar with each 
piece and each actor. A regular and highly trained audience 
will of course require a considerable repertoire and a constant 
change in the bill. It will insist on a wide range of con- 
trasted pieces, and each actor appearing in new characters. 
This makes "runs" impossible. And a "run of a hundred 
nights" spells poor playing, for it means that the theatre is 
nightly filled with a succession of casual visitors, who can 
have no serious opinion of their own, and whose opinion, 
except that they pay their money, does not concern the 
actor or the manager. When a piece runs for a hundred 
or two hundred nights, it involves the shutting the doors of 



THE REVIVAL OF THE DRAMA 289 

the house on all regular play-goers for 96 or 196 nights; for 
no rational lover of the drama can care to see the same 
piece more than three or four times within a few months, 
unless he go to the theatre to see his friends or exhibit his 
devotion to a particular "star." Unless the play-bill is con- 
tinually varied, the audience must be a nomad and casual 
one. And a casual audience is ex vi tennini ignorant, un- 
critical, easily satisfied, and unable to influence the players 
— for the bulk of them have come to see a gorgeous spectacle 
or to say they have seen a famous actor. 

A theatre which has to depend on the daily reports from 
the till is under constant pressure of the most urgent kind 
to fill the house — rem, quocunque modo, rem, is the motto, 
rem meaning a big house. Now, we all know that a house 
may be filled by gorgeous costumes, real water, and a new 
use of the electric light. The higher class of managers 
have shown a really noble courage in resisting the tempta- 
tion to degrade the theatre. But they must live. And they 
have to compromise : they begin with a beautiful and correct 
setting of their piece; it passes on into fine clothes, costly 
properties, and the greasy "boom" business, so that the 
most high-principled manager finds that he will be ruined, 
unless his piece can run a hundred nights. If it does, he 
gets a low-class audience and shuts his doors on the really 
trained judges. 

No company can be really trained unless they constantly 
play to a body of competent judges. And these must be 
guided by a school of criticism of a high intellectual order, 
having command of great literary organs. The company 
also, either by esprit de corps, the joint-stock system, or 
some internal organisation, needs to be as strictly disciplined 
as a good ship's crew, and should be as completely in the 
hands of a competent captain. This is how "the House of 



290 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Moliere" has flourished for two centuries; and every great 
theatre abroad or at home. The conditions of a great 
theatre are (i) a regular, trained, and judicial audience; 
(2) a pecuniary position independent of speculation or for- 
tune-hunting, able to dispense with "runs" and "bumper" 
houses; (3) a company under absolute discipline playing 
before a school of criticism, of high culture, fearless inde- 
pendence, and paramount authority. 

It will be said that these conditions, and perhaps any one 
of them, are impossible in England or in America. And 
perhaps they may be, in the absence of any assistance from 
the State, in the costliness of first-rate artistic power, and in 
the chaos of critical judgment. Under the present arrange- 
ments of society, the market price ruling everything we do, 
it must be allowed that a theatre organised on a high level 
is not to be dreamed of. But there is a conceivable plan on 
which (dream though it be) we might see a great theatre 
grow up and flourish. A great theatre would require a 
large trained body of actors, receiving regular and liberal 
salaries on a permanent engagement, with a stake in the 
fortunes of the house and a voice in its management, but 
otherwise liberally maintained and under strict discipline. 
The pieces must be varied, and both parts and pieces con- 
tinually interchanged. The appointments must be beautiful, 
complete, and correct. The director must have complete 
control, and yet have no temptation to fill his pockets or to 
exhibit his own genius. These conditions involve, it is ob- 
vious, a large deficit at the end of the year. Such a house 
would not be crowded with nomad bagmen and cockneys 
on the spree, but by a regular and trained body of critical 
play-goers. And such an audience w^ould not be able to 
pay for a large company at high and permanent salaries, an 
artistic and learned mise-en-scene, and a play-bill varied two 



THE REVIVAL OF THE DRAMA 29I 

or three times a week. Who then is going to meet the 
deficit? For it is perfectly certain that, in England and 
America, the State will not contribute a cent. 

I believe the day will come when public-spirited citizens 
will undertake this social duty on public grounds. There 
is no end to which wealth, taste, and munificence could more 
properly devote itself. Libraries, museums, institutes, parks, 
picture-galleries, and colleges, are continually being dedi- 
cated to the public by generous benefactors who desire to 
make a social use of some part of their fortune. Why does 
not one of these men found a theatre and endow it for a 
given period, or run a theatre on a grand scale out of his 
own purse? Such theatres as the Comedie Frangaise could 
be run for ten or twenty years at least for the same capital 
sum as is often sunk in a college or a gallery of pictures. 
Of course the public would pay at the doors the current 
rates, and the founder would have to meet only the annual 
deficit, and he could always fill the theatre with gratuitous 
orders judiciously distributed. All great theatres that are 
known to history were supported by the munificence of 
private citizens. The theatre at Athens was maintained 
during the whole of its glorious career by these means, which 
were known as ''liturgies,'" or public services. So was the 
theatre and indeed all the spectacles at Rome, both under 
Republic and Empire. So was the theatre of the age of 
Louis XIV., so was that of Weimar in the age of Goethe. 
And out of the same system arose the opera and almost the 
whole of the music of modern Europe, whether for chamber 
or theatre. Our later age has determined to deal in drama 
just as it deals in pork — and we see the result in the system 
of "stars," spectacular pieces, and the advertising boom. 

It must be surely some kind of antiquated religious 
prejudice which has hitherto diverted from the theatre 



292 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the munificent stream of public benefactions which flow so 
freely for other forms of art. Why do we retain for this 
branch of art alone the rigid idea of money down and market 
value for the money? In ancient times the theatre was a 
public and even a religious festival, and the audience prac- 
tically had gratuitous entrance. In a gallery of ancient 
masters, a museum of antiquities or a scientific institute, it is 
not thought essential to take money at the doors, nor is the 
value of the collection to be measured by the number who 
pass the turnstiles. The National Museums of Europe and 
America, to which citizens are free, contain on the whole 
more than is open to the paying public at the World's Fair. 
There is no absolute bond between excellence and price. 
Many a precious thing is free to all : many a costly thing is 
worthless to every one. And this is especially true of Art, 
where cost and value are not seldom in inverse ratio to 
each other. A great theatre must be a theatre on an intel- 
lectual, moral, and social level with a great collection of art 
treasures. It can never be maintained by the money taken 
at the doors, till the culture and habits of our people are 
entirely transformed. And the only way in which it can be 
maintained is by the munificence of some citizen of great 
wealth, high culture, and ardent public spirit. 



P.S. 1908. — How different a song we all sing to-day ! 
But such was our ill-humour in the ancient days of the pre- 
Shavian, pre-Arthurian, pre-Pinerotic era. 



Ill 

DECADENCE IN MODERN ART 

{From ''The Forum,^^ N.Y., 1893) 

There is no feature in our present age of which we are more 
proud than our revived interest in Art, our renewed success 
in Art ; and we are wont to look back on our grandfathers 
as having lived in the dark ages of taste. There is solid 
ground for this pride ; our knowledge, our judgment, our in- 
stinct for Art have shown for more than a generation a great 
development. Our zeal for new forms of art is conspicuous. 
But, with an irrepressible thirst to be original at any cost, 
there is a tendency at work of a thoroughly debased kind. 
Of the dangers of this I would say a few words. 

Reaction against the conventional, the melodramatic and 
the "sweetly pretty," is wholesome and natural; and it is 
much to have secured a general revolt against these besetting 
vices of an artificial age. But revolt and iconoclasm are 
only the beginning of reformation; and in Art especially 
the more violent forms of protest are full of harm. It boots 
little to be rid of the conventional in order to set up an idol 
in the brutal, the coarse, the odd, the accidental, and dull 
imitation of rank commonplace. Yet this is a growing creed 
amongst the motley crowds of those who imagine themselves 
to be pursuing Art in many forms and under very different 
inspiration. 

In literature, in the drama, in painting, in sculpture, even 
in architecture and in music, we are now bidden to admire 

293 



294 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

what is simply novel ; and the test of true genius is discovered 
to be the disgusting or the eccentric. In the vast field of 
literature, which is so infinitely more subtle and complex 
than any other form of art, it is true that, under strict reserve, 
and in a master's hand, there is room for idiosyncrasies and 
for horrors. In fiction, and to some degree in poetry, a 
powerful imagination may deal with the grotesque and the 
repulsive. Their suggestions are far less concrete and defi- 
nite than those of the arts of form. But painting, with its 
sharp, vivid, imitative limits, cannot safely venture on these 
gross reproductions of the brutal and the vulgar. When 
painting does this, it is degenerating into literary instead of 
artistic resources. And it is a proof of decadence and aim- 
less vacuity when the painter endeavours to goad us into 
interest by the same appeal to our sense of disgust with 
which the novelist has long exhausted our patience. 

At the root of his tendency lie mere conceit, a craving for 
notice, and ignorance of the methods, limits, and conditions 
of Art. A raw lad who, except that he can twirl about a 
brush, has as little intellectual training as an errand-boy, 
solemnly warns us — "That is what / see!" — "That is 
what / like !" — "This and That are what / know !" But 
what if the visions of this youth, his likes and his dislikes — 
even what he calls his "joys" and his "passions" — are wholly 
without interest or value to any rational and cultivated man ? 
What, if the queer things he may have learned in some 
obscure hole, are tedious, it may be nauseous, to thinking 
people who want no such experience? A man may go down 
into a sewer, or a dissecting-room, or a coal-pit, and may 
there see things which are not familiar to the public and which 
it would disgust the public to see. Accordingly he paints 
these things in an odd matter-of-fact way, as protests against 
the conventional and the sugary in Art, and he calls on us 



DECADENCE IN MODERN ART 295 

to admire a really original masterpiece. Michael Angelo 
and Rembrandt may occasionally touch such a subject, 
which their genius could clothe with a wild poetry. But 
a common pot-boiler, which can clothe them only in very 
squalid prose, is mere impertinence. 

One rarely sees an exhibition of pictures now, especially 
in France, without plenty of literal transcripts from hospitals, 
police cells, and dens of infamy. A powerful imagination 
might find art even there. But the aim of these modern 
"artists" is not art — but disgust. They give us merely 
coloured photographs, without grace, pathos, awe, life, or 
invention. Their purpose is to be as ugly, as crude, as 
photographic, as unpleasant, as canvas and dull paint can 
make it. It is not even grim ; it is not sensational ; it is 
not a tour de force. Everything is fiat, angular, prosaic, 
nasty. Few persons have witnessed the operation of ovariot- 
omy, or a lesson in anatomy, or a drunken orgy in a night- 
house. To give a literal rendering of one of such scenes 
ministers in some to a prurient curiosity. And the artist has 
his reward in the grinning groups around his work. But 
it is no more art than is the report of a filthy trial, or the de- 
scriptions in a manual of surgery. 

Another favourite device, again in France especially is 
the serving up to the general public those nasty oddities 
which are inevitable in the studio, the dressing-rooms of a 
theatre, or a booth at a country fair, or any other place where 
habit and toil have expelled modesty and refinement. "The 
model scratching her back," "The model has sat down on 
a wet palette," "The acrobat enjoying a jug of beer," — 
such are good titles in the catalogue to arouse a jaded interest. 
Any stupid horse-play which causes a grin in a studio or a 
circus will equally serve the turn. It is novel to the public ; 
and to paint it with a dull photographic realism will give the 



296 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

spectator a puzzle to work out. Crowds will say — "What 
on earth is that?" They never saw anything like it; and so 
it will supply them with new information and experience. 

Some hold that Art means utter dulness and strict elimina- 
tion of every source of interest. A dirty old woman vacantly 
staring at a heap of stones, a pig wallowing in fetid mud, 
a dusty high road between two blank walls, a sand-bank 
under a leaden sky — such are the chosen spectacles dear 
to rising genius. It is impossible to find in them a trace 
of beauty, poetry, pathos, incident, or grace. When these are 
presented with a monotonous realism in a imiform tone of 
drab or mud, we are triumphantly told that conventionalism 
is routed and Truth in art is enthroned. There are now to 
be seen pictures on Exhibition walls wherein nothing whatever 
can be detected but a sickly blur in a haze of grey monochrome. 
It is true that sensationalism and conventionalism are at last 
got rid of. But so they would be, if the artist had left his 
canvas blank, or had put his palette in a gold frame and 
named it "Day-dreams," or a "Fugue in primitive colours." 

Others again, in pursuit of the novel and the real, will 
laboriously discover some trick in nature, some unfamiliar 
and quite accidental collocation of objects, some artificial 
reflection, some conundrum in colour, and they very con- 
scientiously paint the queer subject. "Do you think it un- 
natural ? Ah ! then you never saw a green frog crawling over 
a bare bosom in a flash of lightning. If you had, you would 
have seen just that!" It may be; but we don't want to 
perpetuate such unusual incidents, even if we ever saw them. 
And if the scene was really like that, it must have been any- 
thing but pleasant. "Who ever saw a woman with green 
flesh and blue hair?" — "Yes ! but you never saw the reflex 
colours of a tropical jungle in a thunderstorm ! " We certainly 
never did. But when we go to picture-galleries we like to 



DECADENCE IN MODERN ART 297 

see pictures, pictures that are intelligible without a catalogue 
or a lecture on optics ; and we do not care to see kaleido- 
scopic juggleries in mysterious frames. 

Ah ! the frames ! Raphael and Titian nowadays have 
gone into partnership with their frame-makers, and they 
share the glory in equal halves. Your painter to-day is as 
fantastic in his frames as some would-be women of fashion 
in the device of their note-paper. Every trick that was ever 
tried to amuse children in a Christmas card now figures in 
a picture Exhibition; and works of art are advertised in 
their fancy wrapper like pills and soap. Of course the 
school of the "bleeding Coster" has his slang frame. The 
sides of a packing-case, some long boots, an unbarked rail, 
the boughs of a tree, or a leathern apron — any one of these 
makes a new and effective frame with downright realism 
and nothing conventional at all. They call attention to the 
work of art inside, if they do not monopolise attention ; they 
show an aspiring genius and a freedom from cant. There is 
one form of frame which I have not yet seen tried, the idea 
of which I propose to patent in Paris, London, New York, 
and Chicago. It is an apparatus by which the frame con- 
tains a mechanical whistle or "hooter," set to give voice 
every three minutes or oftener if required. The fortunate 
artist who first obtained this whistling frame would force the 
spectators in the gallery to turn to his canvas. That would 
give him what he seems to regard as the main end of his art. 

We need say nothing about the delirious affectation of "Sar 
Peladan" and the "Independent Artists" and of other petits 
mattres who attitudinise in various galleries. The "hooting" 
frame would answer their purpose far better. But, as an 
indication of the "winds of doctrine" now crossing the art- 
world, they should be observed. Things must be out of joint 
when, not one, but fifty "artists" can cover the walls of public 



298 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

exhibitions with mere practical jokes. One of them paints 
his picture — say a young woman beside a river in a meadow 
near a wood — and over the whole finished piece he daubs 
on purple blotches about two inches long and a third of, an 
inch wide. These streaks, like woolly caterpillars on a leaf, 
go right across girl, river, meadow, sky, and wood — "over 
all," as the heralds say. The effect is supposed to be that 
the picture is worked in Berlin wool. Beside it, a naked 
hermaphrodite stands on the top of a deep water without 
sinking through the surface, gazing at the sun with a rapt 
expression. These things are "an allegory": this is modern 
symbolism. Before another "symbolic" work of modern 
genius lately stood a group of experienced artists, disputing 
as to what was the visible subject of the picture. One thought 
it was a battle-piece; another insisted it was shell-fish in a 
tank; others took it for a Last Judgement; and one was 
positive it was ripe fruit. 

Unfortunately, this pursuit of the grotesque is not confined 
to buffoons. Men of real power, men of undeniable in- 
fluence, are making systematic efforts to establish in Art 
the reign of ugliness, brutality, dulness. Whatever is loath- 
some, whatever is eccentric, whatever is common, — this, we 
are assured, is the native home of Art. It is a creed prac- 
tised and taught by some who really can draw and paint ; 
and it is justified by a school of critics coarse of tongue and 
quarrelsome in temper. " Who drives fat oxen should 
himself be fat," as Dr. Johnson put it. And the apostle of 
the foul in Art is certainly not nice in his language or cour- 
teous in his manners. We can afford to pass by with a 
smile the mere mountebanks and their literary puffers. But 
we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that men of true gift and 
trained skill are dragging down their Art into the mire ; and 
it is time to weigh their claims and their theories. For it 



DECADENCE IN MODERN ART 299 

concerns much more than Art. Like every other claim to 
degrade human life, it has a moral and a social side which 
concerns us all. 
Reduced to its elements, their theory is this: 
"Art means the representation of Nature. Whatever is 
found in Nature is the subject of Art. The test of Art is 
Success in representation : nothing else at all. The business 
of the artist is to show how cleverly he can use his brush. 
It matters not what he paints, if it enables him to display 
dexterity. You, the spectator, must not think about the 
painting — the one thing to be thought of is the painter. 
You may not like the result of his work : you may find it 
as a picture, tedious, revolting, grotesque. So much the 
worse for you. The painter sees that; the painter enjoys 
that dull or foul sense ; the painter once saw that queer com- 
bination. It is no business of yours that it does not interest 
you. Your business is to see how very cleverly he has put on 
to canvas this filth or this dulness. If you cannot see it, 
you are a rank Philistine, and had better buy oleographs 
evermore. Art has been ruined by its silly straining after the 
beautiful, the ideal, the charming, and the ennobling. There 
is in Nature quite as much that is coarse, dull, odd, and foul 
— perhaps much more — and it is far more obvious and 
intelligible. Art henceforth means the realism of the seamy 
side of Nature and Man. We have been surfeited by the 
pursuit of grace, beauty, and dignity, which have led Art into 
a world of sickly conventions. We are now in for naturalism 
in its real, crude, naked shape. If techniqtie is right, all is 
right. The one test of Art is — du Chic, du Chic, encore du 
Chic!'' 

These are the Ten Commandments of the Ugly School. 
And we may say at once that Art has never before been en- 
dangered by a creed at once so false and so base. It is the 



300 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

product of conceit in the artist, stimulated by the demoralising 
system of public Exhibitions filled by competition, in an age 
when social principles are being cast pell-mell into the melting- 
pot. What matters to us the cleverness of the artist, as such ? 
We want something to be a joy for ever ; we have no interest 
in the smartness of somebody advertising his wares. If his 
"cleverness" is thrust on our attention, it is a nuisance; 
if we perceive his advertising tricks, it is an offence. If a 
painter in effect says to us — " Never mind my picture, 
look at my brush-work!" — it is an outrage. We could 
not endure the Cartoons, if every robe were inscribed 
^^ Raphael fecit" in letters a foot in height. The painter 
who aims at displaying how astonishingly smart he can be, 
is not a painter, but an acrobat. A tragedian might perform 
Hamlet standing on his head instead of his feet, but we should 
not call him a great actor. We come to see a drama and not 
a performer's tricks. The less we see of the painter, the less 
we notice his method, and the more we feel the work as work 
of art, and the more we enjoy it for itself and not for its 
producer — the nearer do we get to true Art. 

It is mere impertinence for a man, of whose culture and 
attainments we have no guarantee at all, to come forward 
and tell us that he loves a murky sky, a sandy waste, or a 
drunken tramp; that he sees Nature through a green or 
purple lens ; that he is quite at home in squalid dens and 
dingy byways — that we must take his likes and dislikes, 
and put our own away. Yes ! if he can throw poetry and 
power into the common, if he be Israels or Millet, Meryon 
or Decamps. We care for the least sign of interest in any- 
thing from Michael Angelo and Rembrandt, because we have 
certain evidence that they had a creative brain and a profound 
spirit. But in the absence of any such evidence, why need 
we adopt the likings of the first man who has picked up a 



DECADENCE IN MODERN ART 30I 

trick of the brush ? For aught we know, his eyesight may have 
been distorted, and his soul turned sour in the dregs of some 
Parisian " Trois Rats," where all that he ever knew of life was 
drawn. If such an one, without poetry, pathos, or imagina- 
tion, presents to us a crude, dull, photographic copy of some- 
thing gross, something wearisome, such as we should turn 
from with loathing in real life, how is the offence mended 
by the artist's assurance that he loves it himself, and by his 
friends' assurances that he is a very diahle du chic with his 
brush ? 

Real genius gives us a great deal more than the Chic, the 
craft of the brush; and, however wonderful be its brush- 
work, that is always the least part of the whole, that of which 
we think least, and notice last. To real genius all things are 
open, and if it choose to rest for a space on what is common 
or gross, genius speaks to us from out it in tones that go 
down to our hearts. But the painter touches the gross and 
the common at his peril. If he has nothing to tell us save 
that it is common and gross, it avails him little to add that 
he is himself immensely clever. If he be, let him give us 
what we can enjoy. To serve up what he enjoys himself, he 
might as well ask us to see him enjoy a brandy cock-tail or 
a dish of tripe. We have no taste for tripe, or for cock-tails 
— nor indeed for him. Of course he can only paint what 
he sees; he must tell us what he knows; and show us what 
he has observed. But a previous question arises — is he 
wanted at all? There are very many clever people in the 
world ; and unfortunately, many of them are a mere incum- 
brance and nuisance on this earth. In this aesthetic age, 
when millions of men and women are dying to have a taste, 
a clever artist of any kind (be he only a good-looking youth 
who has taken to the stage) can very soon gather an admiring 
claque. But the real question is, whether mere technical 



302 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

cleverness, without genius or learning, has any locus standi 
in an age of high culture. 

All visible things may be painted, and the accomplished 
artist should be able to paint anything paintable. It is no 
doubt an excellent training for him to paint anything he 
sees, exactly as he sees it, however flat, however ugly. But 
this is merely his exercise, his studio practice, his "training" 
work. We no more want to see these exercises exhibited, 
than we want to see the dancer and the acrobat at home 
training their muscles, or the musician practising scales. 
The bulk of what our modern naturalists exhibit as works of 
art are nothing but the crude exercises of a learner. To the 
student the bare and gritty fact is indispensable. No one 
can ever be an artist who has not completely mastered it. 
But it is only the A B C of art, as are scales to a musician, 
and somersaults to an acrobat. Art only begins, when he 
who can present facts perfectly comes to see how facts may 
be presented with feeling and imagination. It is quite true 
that we have long had to put up with sentimental feeling and 
theatrical imagination, and no terms need be kept with these 
sickly abortions. But to stamp out feeling and imagination 
altogether is an error just as gross. And in order to sterilise 
feeling and imagination, the ambition of "modernity" too 
often seems to be, to lavish conspicuous agility of brush on 
the vulgarest bit of fact which Earth or Man can present. 
That is — le vrai Chic. 

Let us never hold parley with this Gospel of grossness and 
conceit. Art does not exist that its professors may show 
their skill with their tools, any more than Literature exists 
only to show how men of letters can handle a pen, any more 
than Religion exists only to show how eloquently preachers 
can discourse about Heaven. We do not suffer a musician to 
startle his audience with brilliant fingering, and to tell them 



DECADENCE IN MODERN ART 303 

that it is no business of theirs whether the music he plays be 
pleasing or commonplace. Nor would we listen to the actor 
who told us to admire his elocution or his make-up, and that 
it was all one, if the words of the play were by Shakespeare 
or by Gibber. Yet there is growing up a new order of painter 
whose device is — "I am the blessed Glendoveer: 'tis mine 
to paint, and yours to gaze." "Modernity" is a fine thing, 
and new efforts are very much to be encouraged. But even 
in this age of perpetual change, there are a few stable canons 
of philosophy and human nature left untouched ; and if they 
do not enter into the curriculum of education in the Life Schools 
of London and Paris, they have not been entirely dethroned. 
And the central of these canons is this, that the business of 
Art is to increase the beauty and the happiness of human life. 
Society in self-defence must put its foot down on the de- 
grading affectation of those who love to accentuate all that 
is ugly and dreary in Nature and in Man. It is an easier 
trade than adding to the sum of beauty and happiness. And 
it is unquestionably a newer trade. Their squalid paradox 
would never have been heard of, save in an epoch of incessant 
change and of chaos in opinion. We live in a world which 
is growing quite delirious for something new, when any 
revolt is hailed as a new dispensation. A man has only to 
shout out loud enough the new Gospel — say, " Murder 
a fine art," "The true beauty of dirt," or "Ugliness as a joy 
forever," — and he straightway gathers round him a sympa- 
thetic group. The system of Art Exhibitions, unloiown and 
impossible in any great age of Art, with its competition and 
its advertising tricks, is continually feeding the vanity, the 
jealousy, the cupidity of the artist. Nowhere is "the struggle 
for life" more acute. It begets such a spirit as reigns over 
Monte Carlo and Wall Street. In the frantic thirst to win, 
any paradox must be tried, any degradation accepted. Where 



304 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

at most a hundred men in all are so born as to be worthy of 
devoting their lives to Art, ten thousand are struggling to get 
heard of, and to have their canvases bought. Our very en- 
thusiasm to get a New Art, we know not whence or how, is so 
ill-directed that it threatens to make any good Art impossible. 

Direction ! — there perhaps lies the root of the matter, 
and the source of our danger. The essential claim of "mod- 
ernity" is to assert the absolute independence of Art, and 
to defy any sort of condition of limit, whether of tradition, 
philosophy, morality, or even good sense. The artist, they 
tell us, is an angelic being who is a law unto himself, and the 
world has merely to gaze at his gambols, and to enjoy his 
enjoyments, as we do with some rare and diverting beast at 
a show. No claim can be more preposterous. There is no 
better ground that Art should be independent of all other 
human activity, or be more of a law unto itself, than that lit- 
erature, or industry, or politics should be. Rational civilisa- 
tion implies that all forms of social hfe should equally conform 
to human experience, should work on some recognised prin- 
ciples, should visibly conduce to moral and social progress. 

The ancient world of Art was inspired by its beautiful 
and inexhaustible mythology. The mediseval world of Art 
was inspired by its sublime and pathetic hagiology. The 
Renascence was inspired by that rich and joyous Humanism, 
such as we find in Micheel Angelo and Ariosto, in Spenser 
and in Shakespeare. There never was, and there never will 
be, any epoch of great Art which had not its own religious, 
social, or national enthusiasm, its recognised ideals of beauty 
and happiness, its sense that the duty of Art was to minister 
to a nobler life. It will be an evil day, when Art comes to 
mean individual caprice, and the artist means a clever trades- 
man scheming to get business — when the ideal of Beauty is 
displaced by feats of manual dexterity. 



DECADENCE IN MODERN ART 305 

It is true that we have got rid of any pretension whether of 
Theology, Church, custom, or convention, to keep Art in 
leading-strings and to crush it by Egyptian or Byzantine 
formulas. There is no danger of returning to such bar- 
barous slavery of a superstitious age. But to rush to the 
extreme of handing over Art to individual caprice and in- 
tellectual chaos is a very different thing. And to what in- 
dividual caprices are we asked to submit? To the crude 
experiments of men, the great majority of whom have never 
shown a sign of intellectual culture or inspiring ideas, and 
whose highest ambition is to get their "values" right. Cer- 
tainly the "values" must be right, if anything is to be done 
at all, just as the notes must not be flat if we are to play or 
sing to any purpose. But "values," and notes in tune, are 
but the A B C of the art ; and when they are got right, every- 
thing still remains to be done. The business of Art is to 
increase the beauty and the happiness of human life. And 
until the craftsman is duly abreast of all that is known, felt, 
and thought by the most competent minds and the purest 
spirits of his time — till then, he remains a craftsman and 
cannot be enrolled in the noble army of artists. 

The old religious ideals, the old poetic ideals, the old social 
ideals are certainly passing away, and we are all waiting till 
the new ideals are fully formed, and ampler canons of life 
and beauty are revealed. But these are not to be reached 
by ingenious experiments with a palette, or by the random 
fancies of men who have neither wide grasp of life nor serious 
intellectual culture. Our painters need an education far 
larger than that of third-rate poetry and comic literature. 
And in the meantime desperate efforts to do something 
original by men who have no single qualification to make 
them intellectual leaders, are certain to lead us still farther 
astray. It is but too obvious that nearly all that which served 



3o6 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

to inspire great art in past times is now worn out. But to 
preach to us that Art needs no inspiration, no ideals, no guid- 
ance, no thought, no beauty, no self-control — that its sole 
task is to put on canvas whatever is to be seen — this is the 
broad road that leadeth to destruction. 

Let me not be taken to be a partisan of the old academic 
conventionality, with its sickly round of Dresden-china puppets 
and its inane assortment of stage properties. I am defending 
no particular school, as I am censuring no particular person. 
We have amongst us painters who, if their results fall short 
of their aim, have a fine imagination, a true sense of beauty, 
and a high conception of the dignity and the conditions of 
their art. We have such men, and let us be thankful for 
them. And, if they are but a few in the midst of a crowd still 
given over to conventional routine and trivial interests, it is 
simply that we are living in an age which is not yet great in 
the arts of form. On the other hand, I have been condemning 
no single person and no single group or school. There are 
several groups now working in many countries who are trying 
most different methods, and preaching most different doctrines. 
They are mostly to be noticed in France, which is now the 
recognised nidus where all new ideas in art are fermenting. 
In many of these efforts after a new type I recognise some 
of the most hopeful signs of our time. Especially is that 
true of those poetic efforts to combine fact, beauty, pathos, 
and reality in the aspect of common things and lowly lives 
— which may be said to culminate in the Angelus. Here 
is the true path. But among these new groups, raging to 
be "original," both here and in France, there are some to 
whom beauty — nobleness of aspect or of feeling — even 
decency — are a mockery and an offence; some whose ideal 
it is to be dull, or to be eccentric, or to be brutal. For such 
there is no hope in this world or the next. 



IV 

ART AND SHODDY 

{From "The Forum, ^' N.Y., 1893) 

Surprise has been expressed by some on both sides of the 
Altantic, that one who is so often called an optimist, and who 
certainly looks forward with enthusiastic hope to a great de- 
velopment of every form of human life, should have spoken 
of a certain decadence as visible to-day in our poetry, our 
romance, our art. It is true that I have been showing ex- 
amples of a certain slackness in creative force, sundry morbid 
tendencies, an obvious state of chaos, and some false prophets 
in our midst; and those whose business in the great Fair is 
chiefly to beat gongs and to shout to the crowd, have been 
calling out, "Here is a wicked pessimist, here is a cynic: — 
hurry up you poets, novelists, and painters, and fall upon this 
sour old fellow, who tells you that you are played out, and have 
got to take a back seat!" And more to the same effect in 
the peculiar language of their very popular art. 

With all the convictions which I hold forcing on me great 
hopes in the ultimate future, any sense of disappointment T 
may feel in the present is only a passing mood, and relates to 
special causes at work for a time. We live, it is plain, in an 
age of transition; we are trying new lines of activity; and 
are making some crucial experiments. We are rapidly 
casting off traditions and beliefs, and are eagerly searching 
about for new beliefs, new canons — which it is but too 
obvious that we have not found, or at least that we cannot 

307 



3o8 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

agree that we have found. Many cry, Lo here, Lo there! 
many shout, Eureka; but the world smiles and shakes its 
head, and waits. I have tried to point out that we must wait 
a little longer, and that many an Eureka is decidedly pre- 
mature. And I will now indicate some of the adverse causes 
which retard us, and why we have need of caution and patience 
in our forecast. With an unshaken confidence in the resources 
of human nature, whatever I see to dishearten us has reference 
to none but temporary causes. 

Again, some of those to whom I fear I am known but in 
a very distant and casual way, have wondered that I should 
take any interest in poetry, romance, or art; and how one 
whose main business for thirty years past has lain with the 
doctrines of Auguste Comte, should now be presuming to 
talk about verses and novels and painting. So far as Comte is 
concerned, nothing is more striking than the vast importance 
which he assigns to imaginative power, so that in his Library 
of chosen books he gives one-fifth to poetry, romance, and art, 
and in his Calendar of chosen heroes he has given to these 
nearly one-fourth of the whole. High, broad, and pure Art, 
in all its various modes whether of words, of form, or of 
sounds, is bound up with the nobility of human life. De- 
cadence in art is a sure sign of some organic change taking 
place in our moral sense. Healthy art is the outward and 
visible sign of an inward and spiritual growth. And men who 
would smile to be told that our age is too eager after wealth, 
too prone to worship public success, and greedy after coarse 
forms of luxury, are moved when they see these moral dis- 
orders poisoning the very arts of daily life. 

There are very plain tendencies of a general kind which 
are not favourable to the higher forms of imaginative work. 
If there is one thing which is more than another peculiar to 
our own age, it is that it is an age of specialism. In science, 



ART AND SHODDY 309 

in sociology, as in practical things, the most curious sub- 
division of employment has become the rule. Histories of a 
single country over a few years fill many volumes, and occupy 
exactly the same time in composition as the events occupied 
in transaction. A great reputation in natural history is 
achieved by a life-long study of one species of coleoptera. 
He is a very learned man who knows even the literature of 
a single nation and of any moderate number of centuries. 
A painter spends a long and laborious life in reproducing one 
class of scene or subject. I will not say that specialism is 
otherwise than essential, nor am I prepared to deny that it is 
the strength of our knowledge. But it is most antipathetic 
to Art. Art is eminently synthetic. It combines, trans- 
figures, and crystallises everything it touches. Art means 
unity of conception; and specialism means disparate and 
dispersive observation. 

It is vain then to look for any very great art, either in litera- 
ture or in the special arts of form, under the reign of uni- 
versal Specialism. Music and poetry are not so closely depend- 
ent on the visible present. But prose romance, the drama, 
painting, sculpture, architecture, even acting and dress, can- 
not free themselves from the environment of dry and precise 
rule, of minute subdivision of opinion and knowledge. Om- 
niscient criticism, fastidious taste, microscopic learning, 
surround them with the cold curious stare of British dowagers 
in a drawing-room. Giotto, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, 
Holbein, Raffaelle, were architects, sculptors, or decorators, 
as well as painters: Velazquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, were 
men of splendid culture and spacious life, who could clothe 
every aspect of the visible world with a deep glow of meaning 
and beauty. An "artist" in the cinque-cento, meant one who 
saw human life in a higher light than common men, and who 
could teach men the dignity of their own existence. If 



3IO REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Raffaelle to-morrow were to paint a new "School of Athens" 
a hundred critics would tell him that his archaeology was all 
wrong, and his Greek hardly up to pass in the "Little-Go." 
And as to the historic pictures of Veronese and Rubens, every 
schoolboy would be laughing at some anachronism, and would 
write to the Times to show that the Romans knew nothing 
of cheiton and chlamys, nor did Greeks ever wear paluda- 
mentum and caligce. 

We know so much about the history of architecture that 
we build an Imperial Institute or a World's Fair with many 
different "styles" pieced together, like a patchwork quilt, 
as if they were geologic specimens in a glass case. Our 
historic tragedies are wonderful lessons in the comparative 
History of Costume; and Mr. Irving, if not always audible 
as an elocutionist, is usually faultless as an antiquarian. 
One cannot have everything at once. Vast and exact learn- 
ing, critical purism, and dispersive studies are fatal to the 
forked lightning flash of great art. We have still men nobly 
struggling to give some unity to art — Sir Frederick Leighton, 
William Morris, G. F. Watts, Whistler, and others who do 
something more than turn out replicas of a bit of blue sea or 
a favourite cow. We shall no doubt again have an age when 
Synthesis will weigh more than Analysis, and Conception of 
the Whole more than Observation of the Parts. We shall 
have again an age of coherent ideas : — and when we have 
that, we shall have another age of Great Art (1893). 

Democracy, again, is a blessed word, the peculiar boast of 
our age on both sides of the Atlantic, as certain to grow as 
anything else on this earth. I am assuredly not one who sees 
with alarm the ever-growing influence of the masses and 
their increased share of the world's products. Far other- 
wise: for to me civilisation means nothing else than the 
opening to the whole mass of the people the culture, the 



ART AND SHODDY 3II 

power, the welfare which are now not so particularly well 
used by the fortunate few. But it must be admitted that 
this distant Utopia has not yet been reached, and that the 
stage of transition has its own defects. It is but too pain- 
fully obvious that the great public has not yet acquired a 
mature and refined taste in matters of grace and beauty, 
and has but scant leisure to enjoy that ideal in the actual 
which we call Art. The old feudal organisation of society 
with a wealthy and leisured class at the top, amidst all its 
social and economic evils, did conduce to a certain standard 
of culture and a practical pursuit after beautiful things. It 
was very far from being the best or purest mode of stimulat- 
ing the productions of genius. But it did much in various 
ages of the past to promote art; and it cannot be said that 
Democracy has yet been able to fill its part with entire 
success. 

Nor is it Democracy of the age of Pericles or of the Italian 
Republics in the Middle Ages, but a Democracy combined 
with an ever-grinding industrialism, that wrings the last 
ounce from the labour of millions, while it suddenly heaps 
up vast wealth in the hands of the ignorant and the mean. 
How can the imagination flourish in such a world? It is 
wonderful that poetry has done so much : — - but the poet, as 
I have said throughout, like the musician, lives more in a 
dream-world of his own, which is impossible in the arts of 
form. The architect, the painter, the sculptor, the designer, 
the decorator in every kind, has to work in a grim world, 
where the journeyman has small interest or enjoyment, ex- 
cept in earning his day's wage, where beauty and grace are 
treated as cruel hindrances to the rapid accumulation of 
fortune; and where boundless wealth is often placed in the 
absolute control of men who find little delight in it except as 
it ministers to caprice and ostentation. Pharaoh tells the 



312 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

children of Israel that they are idle, and shall have no straw, 
and yet shall deliver their tale of bricks. Genius must be 
free: Art must have a light heart. To deliver a tale of 
bricks to taskmasters revolts its inmost soul, and is ever 
beyond its force. 

This indeed is the real root of the mischief — that Art in 
all its forms is become a mere article of commerce. We buy 
works of imagination, like plate or jewelry, at so much the 
ounce or the carat ; and we expect the creator of such works 
to make his fortune like the "creator" of ball costumes, or 
of a dinner service. We have got rather into what 
logicians call "a vicious circle" — the buyers crying out, 
"Give us a really great work of art, and we will pay 
whatever you ask!" — the artist replying, "Guarantee us a 
handsome income for life, and in good time we will give you 
an immortal work !" Neither of these proposals is accepted, 
nor can they be accepted. The artist has to boil his pot, and 
now-a-days he likes his pottage to be as savoury and costly as 
that of his neighbours, and he has not the leisure or the wealth 
to meditate for years on a truly immortal work. On the 
other hand, the buyer, who is usually a keen business man, 
not unnaturally says, "I must have value for my money, 
and to keep an artist in luxury, whilst he is meditating a 
big thing, is not my idea of business!" 

All buying and selling involves in some form or other a 
market. And hence the curious institution of periodical 
Art Exhibitions. I do not hesitate to put down very much 
in our deficiency in art-sense to this demoralising habit. 
When the practice began, and it did not begin until all the 
great traditions in art were exhausted and all the great artists 
had become Old Masters, when the practice was fresh, and 
its uses seemed obvious, there was a priori much to be hoped 
from it. Aspiring genius was to place its productions side 



ART AND SHODDY 313 

by side for comparison; men of taste and wide experience 
were to be the judges; the great public was to be educated; 
and buyers and sellers were to meet in open mart. How 
different the actual result ! It was not genius, so much as 
industry, knack, and smartness, that covered the Exhibition 
walls. The "works of art" were crammed together like 
herrings in a barrel, and their diversity of tone and subject 
produced the same impression of discord on the eye as the 
ear would feel if a thousand instruments in one big orchestra 
were all set to perform a different tune. The violin trilled 
out a sonata, the flute played a jig, the cornet rang out 
Yankee Doodle, and the drum boomed forth the "Dead 
March" in Saul. 

The judges too began to wrangle; they called each other 
bad names, and devoted the works of art they disliked to the 
hangman, or declared that their own friends were far greater 
than Raffaelle and Michael Angelo. There were cliques, 
sets, favouritism, murmurs of jobbery, and violent recrimi- 
nation. The great public, puzzled by the diversities of the 
critics, unfortunately took to develop its own taste unaided; 
and it consolidated its opinion into a love for commonplace, 
for the vulgar, the silly, the conventional. The middleman, 
alas ! soon stepped in, as he always does, when money is to 
be made, and he soon became the absolute "boss" of the 
whole show. Artists did not sell their works to amateurs and 
collectors — but to the enterprising middleman, to whom 
they were years in debt. Collectors did not buy works 
from the artist — but from the middleman, who had bought 
up in the studio half-finished pieces at half rates; who 
practically dictated to the artist what he should paint, and 
how ; who dictated to the collector what he ought to buy and 
for how much; and who practically educated the public 
as to what it liked or disliked. And Art became as much a 



314 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

matter of professional dealing as a corner in pork, or a Bear 
operation in Erie bonds. 

The unlucky expedient of competitive Exhibitions has had 
many indirect ways of puUing down both artist and pub- 
lic. In a crowd of indiscriminate works it was essential to 
secure attention from the jaded visitor who had in his weary 
hand a catalogue of some four thousand works. To secure 
attention the obvious course had been shown with marked 
success by the vendors of rival soaps and pills. Flesh and 
blood, a starving family, and the laudable desire to have the 
outward marks of successful industry, did the rest. The 
dealer fixed the ruling fashion and an elaborate schedule of 
prices, much as he does in brocades and carpets. The great 
bulk of artists, painters, sculptors, architects, designers, — 
yes! let us add poets, dramatists, novelists, essayists, and 
journalists, — submitted to the inevitable; and Genius, which 
in the heyday of generous youth had dreamed that it would 
live only to paint, to carve, to write, fell back into the ignoble 
crowd which paints, carves, and writes only to live. 

The camel of Holy Writ will have passed through the 
eye of the needle long before Supply and Demand will ever 
have succeeded in creating a great art. And men will be 
gathering grapes of thorns and figs of thistles the day that 
Art Exhibitions promote immortal works. For consider 
how completely every noble work that we know has its own 
peculiar setting of place, time, person, and inspiration. Take 
that type of great art, the Parthenon at Athens. Every 
statue, metope, and bit of frieze had its place in the glorious 
whole, and would be vapid or unintelligible out of it. The 
State chose, employed, and paid the artist, and the chief of 
the State hung over his work with love and pride, as if the 
artist were the best of his own colleagues. The whole was 
to the honour of the great Patron Deity of the State, and the 



ART AND SHODDY 315 

completion of it was a sort of National Sacrament and Thanks- 
giving Day, 

That was the most perfect and typical work of art that 
this earth ever saw. What would it have been if " Theseus," 
and "Ilissus," "Centaurs and Lapithae," had been stuck 
in galleries in the midst of Busts of a prominent citizen, 
dancing-girls, children at play, and the like, numbered 4576 
in the Official Catalogue, "the work of Pheidias, the studios 
Acropolis, price to be had of the secretary; if in Parian 
marble 25 percent extra"? The " Theseus " and " Ilissus " 
look forlorn enough, as it is, in their stately exile in our Elgin 
gallery in London. How would they look in the Paris Salon, 
when poor Pheidias came day by day to the office to ask 
if some rich soap-boiler or pork-dealer had given him his 
price ? 

This, it is true, was the highest moment of human art, 
when everything combined in its favour. But much the 
same may be said of all that the world has agreed to honour. 
Think of that procession of Cimabue's "Madonna" at 
Florence, the scene which Frederick Leighton so well painted, 
— I often think it the happiest subject in modern art, the 
young Giotto beside his master and the youthful Dante 
looking on with delight, — would it be the same to us if the 
" Madonna " had been ordered by a dealer and hung in 
the Exhibition with bits of genre and studies from the nude ? 
It hangs now in Santa Maria Novella, as it has hung for 
some six hundred years, and seems to sanctify the Church, 
as it gave a new name to the Borgo Allegro. Would it be 
all the same if it had been "the picture of the year," and 
bought to adorn a contractor's mansion? Imagine Giotto 
at work in the Arena Chapel at Padua on his great Bible 
history, with Dante watching his work, suggesting subjects, 
and inspiring him with grand "motives." Or imagine 



3l6 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Michael Angelo, shutting himself up in the Medici Chapel 
or in the Sistine Chapel, and communing with the mighty 
spirits of old alone. Or again, take Raffaelle in the Vatican, 
or Tintoretto in San Rocco. What would these works be 
in the screaming dissonance of a modern gallery, exposed to 
the higgling of the market, and designed to catch the acci- 
dental whim of some lucky investor? Everything that we 
love in art had its own time, place, occasion, inspiration. 
Titian, Velazquez, Rubens, and Vandyke, painted noble 
gentlemen and ladies in the costumes in which they lived, 
to hang in their own halls, amidst artistic surroundings of 
absolute harmony. Your R.A. to-day paints a bill-dis- 
counter in a red hunting-suit and breeches and a fur top coat ; 
he charges him a thousand guineas; and the bill-discounter 
is very proud. Raffaelle and JBartolommeo painted Saints 
and Madonnas to place over altars ; Veronese painted sump- 
tuous groups for Venetian palaces; Rembrandt painted the 
men and the scenes amongst which his life was passed, exactly 
as he saw them, and for those who loved them. We have to 
rack our brains for novel subjects, and first and foremost, 
we have to satisfy the dealer. 

I know they say, "Why talk about Raffaelle and Titian, 
who are of course beyond all comparison: there are very 
good painters now, even if they do not belong to the grand 
school." And so, they say in literature, "Do not compare 
us with Milton and Shelley, Fielding and Scott : we have our 
own qualities, and ought not to be judged by classical stand- 
ards." But this is the easy road towards decline — to lower 
the standard of excellence. The one thing essential is — 
to keep a high ideal of perfection steadily before us. Our 
achievement may fall short of our aim : but if our standard is 
true and lofty, we may end by reaching it. Counsel and 
criticism can do little enough, and, perhaps, least of all to 



ART AND SHODDY 317 

help art. But this they can do. They can remind both 
pubhc and worker of the higher levels to which art may rise 
and has risen. They can warn us never to rest satisfied with 
any lower level. Perfection and the highest must be always 
before our eyes. And those who, in the enjoyment of some 
pleasant fashion of the time, or in genuine admiration for 
some popular book, work of art, or style that exactly hits the 
mood of the hour, or the mood of a set — need to be reminded 
how far short of the best it is. 

The mere thought of an ideal perfection is enough to 
convince us how impossible is any high type of art under a 
system of trade and money-making. The pecuniary stand- 
ard, which more or less affects every form of intellectual and 
spiritual activity, seems to have a peculiarly deadening influ- 
ence upon the visual arts. It is due, no doubt, to their direct 
and vivid effect on the personal senses, and to the close con- 
nection they must always have with the external adornment 
of life. The arts are necessarily a part of luxury, public or 
private. And, now that private luxury has almost completely 
superseded public magnificence, the result on art is disastrous. 
Art flourished in the days when, as the Roman poet says, 

Privatus illis census erat brevis, 
Commune magnum — 

Such was Athens in the age of Pheidias, Florence in the age 
of Lorenzo, and Venice, when her Doge's Palace was built 
and adorned. But, in an age when fortunes are made, 
either by pleasing vast numbers of persons, and those for the 
most part half-taught and rude of habit, or else by pleasing 
those who have amassed fortunes and nothing else — the 
pursuit of fortune is the ruin of art. 

I may be asked, what practical measures I would advocate 
to remedy this state of things, a state of things which seems 



3l8 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

but another illustration of the old saying — that "the love 
of money is the root of all evil," There is no practical 
remedy: and my object in what I have said about poetry, 
literature, and art, is simply to insist that there is no practical 
remedy — or none of the immediate and direct kind. The 
only true remedy is that contained in the Apostle's words to 
Timothy : — " They that will be rich fall into temptation and 
a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown 
men in destruction and perdition." And it is as true for the 
artist or the poet to-day as it is for the divine and the disciple, 
as it was true for the Apostle's own son in the faith, whom he 
had left in Ephesus: — "But thou, flee these things; and 
follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, 
meekness." Men hear these words in church on a Sunday, 
and for the next six days in the week they go to 'change and 
to their office, and contend for the turn of the market like 
hungry tigers at the hour of meal. "They that will be rich 
fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and 
hurtful lusts." And no snare is so cunning as that spread for 
those that will be rich in fame and money by their skill in 
art. 

I took up my pen in order to show that this matter of aim- 
lessness in art is at bottom a moral question — as all important 
matters must be — nay, is in truth a religious question, far 
more than one of technique or style or school. It may not be 
religious in the sense of the ordinary pulpit : and so much the 
worse for the ordinary pulpit. The pulpits in vogue utter 
little enough to instruct the artist how he may use his talent 
in a worthy way, and the preacher would be scandalised if 
he were asked to touch such mundane themes. But all the 
same, it is the business of religion and of social ethics to teach 
the noble use of imaginative gifts, and how a pure and lofty 
art may minister to the beauty of a noble life. If the churches 



ART AND SHODDY 



319 



do not know what this means, I am sorry for them. This 
is not the place, nor have I space left here, to explain all I 
mean, when I say that art is a mode of religion, and can 
flourish only under the inspiration of living and practical 
religion. In the meantime, I would say but one word to the 
ingenious youth who aspires to be an artist that he should 
shudder to become a tradesman, that he take up his high 
calling with "love, patience, meekness" — that he hold fast 
by all that is pure, all that is beautiful, all that is broadly 
human. 



V 

THOUGHTS ABOUT EDUCATION 

{From ''The Forum,'' N.Y., 1891) 

It is with no light heart that I act on the wish of the editor 
that I should set down my experience of education as now 
carried on in the Old World. I cannot forget that I have 
had to take part in education in one form or other for nearly 
forty years; that I have been responsible for the education 
of sons of my own ; that I have for years past joined in the 
discussions and conferences on this question : and now I 
feel at times that we are further off the right path than ever, 
as if our whole system were a failure. There are hours 
when I feel about education nothing but this, — wipe it out, 
and let us begin it all afresh. 

It has long been a favourite idea of mine that many things 
work delightfully for good v/hilst they are spontaneous and 
unorganised ; but when they are stereotyped into an elaborate 
art, and evolve a special profession or trade of experts, they 
produce unexpected failures, and end in more harm than 
good. Holidays, excursions, exhibitions, authorship, preach- 
ing, temperance, — a thousand good things and virtuous 
gifts, — end in monster jubilees, world fairs, book-making, 
pulpit-trading, fanatical tyranny, and other invasions of 
peace and freedom. And few things suffer more than edu- 
cation by passing into stereotyped schemes set forth in the 
formulas of the day, and expounded by professional experts. 

320 



THOUGHTS ABOUT EDUCATION 32 1 

A uniform system of education is a form of madness akin 
to a project for making men of one size or one weight. 

After forty years or so I am coming round to think that 
the less we systematise education, dogmatise about it, even 
talk about it, the better. A good education is a general mental 
and moral condition, like a virtuous nature and a healthy 
body ; and we are all treating it as if it were a special art or 
a technical craft, and could be taught like playing the violin, 
or tested like jumping. There is no test of a good education, 
and no specific for making a young mind active and full. 
Minds are far more various than physical constitutions, and 
infinitely more subtle. Education, in a true and high sense, 
implies the development of the mind to its perfection in a 
natural and complete manner ; and yet, whilst every one can 
see the quackery involved in any art of universal health, we 
are still multiplying examinations, educational boards, syl- 
labi, schemes, and royal roads to the making of fine minds. 

If there is one thing on which all the great reformers of 
man's social life have insisted more than another, it is the 
essential unity of education, in its moral, mental, and active 
side, and the hopelessness of trying to build up a truly organic 
education out of many kinds of merely sectional instruction. 
It is like seeking to cure a case of nervous collapse by drugs. 
All real philosophers tell us that man is a complex, subtle, 
but single organism, which we can no more take to pieces 
and treat in segments than we can cut up his body. If there 
be such things as morality and religion, and if anything can 
be said or done by way of inculcating them, or applying them 
to life, then education cannot be severed from morality and 
religion, and all real education must be inspired by religion 
as w^ell as morality. Yet here we all are vowing that religion 
shall not meddle with education, and that morality belongs 
to a set of influences quite apart from schools and universities. 



322 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

No one will suspect me of sighing for the old exclusive 
religious tests of orthodoxy, or of wishing to see our academies 
reformed on the pattern of a Jesuit college. I am not likely 
to forget that for me and for mine no place would be found 
in any theological seminary. I recognise the necessity, 
therefore, as things stand, of eliminating religion from our 
secular education; and, as I do not understand what sys- 
tematic morality can mean if it have no religious direction 
at all, I am bound to recognise further that the moral part in 
our current scholastic systems has to be of a very formal, 
general, and simple kind. But since, in a truly normal 
education, religion is the very essence of noble work, and 
since morality apart from religion is a rattling of dry bones, 
all that we can do in education must be mere provisional 
makeshift. 

We ask too much from education, we make too much of 
it, we monstrously over-organise it, and we cruelly overload 
it. Education can do for us infinitely less than we have 
come to expect ; and what little it can do is on the condition 
that it be left simple, natural, and free. I have known very 
few men who were made into anything great entirely by their 
education; and I have known a good many who were en- 
tirely ruined by it, and were finally turned out as pedants, 
prigs, or idiots. Struggling to win prizes in examination, 
thinking always about the style current to-day, being put 
through the regulation mill, and poring over some little corner 
of knowledge for some material object — may give a one-sided 
appearance of learning with nothing behind it, will turn 
out mechanical eccentricities like calculating-machines, may 
change an honest fellow into a selfish, dull brute, or leave a 
weak brain softened and atrophied for life. And the more 
we organise education, the greater is the risk of our finding 
this result. 



THOUGHTS ABOUT EDUCATION 323 

All that education can really give is this : it can supply the 
opportunities of self-culture ; hold forth new standards and 
ideals to aim at ; it can bring the budding mind into contact 
with a formed and mature mind ; shed over the young spirit 
the inspiring glow of some rare and beautiful intelligence. 
It can open to the learner the door into the vestibule of the 
great Library of the World's Wisdom; but it cannot cram 
its contents into his brain. It can show him a superior 
intellect in the act of collecting and distilling his materials. 
It can suggest, explain, correct, and guide in a very general 
and occasional way; but it cannot teach vigorous thinking, 
or thrust coherent knowledge into a raw mind, as a plough- 
boy can with trouble be taught to write, or to remember the 
multiplication table. The " three R's," the merely mechanical 
instruments of education, may be thus rammed in by sheer 
labour (perhaps they must be so taught). But when we 
speak of "education," we are here meaning the higher train- 
ing professed to be given in the superior colleges and schools. 
And in these it is often a cruel injury to a moderate or dull 
mind to have scraps of "prepared" information, and pep- 
tonised decoctions of science, hammered into its cells, or to 
have essays, poems, and systems of philosophy, "wrung," 
as Milton says, "like blood from the nose." 

The ideal education (as imagined, for instance, in the 
academies of Plato and Aristotle) would be such that a body 
of students, attracted by a great love of knowledge, should 
gather from time to time round some great teacher, till they 
had touch of his informing mind, grasped his method of 
thought, felt inspiration from his typical ideas, asked of him 
questions, and answered his questions to them; and then 
freely went their own way to work out for themselves his 
suggestions, and left him free to think, to observe, experiment, 
or write, until he was again ready to teach. Here is a creative 



324 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

mind lighting up other nascent minds, whom a sense of duty, 
and religious eagerness to behold the face of the great goddess 
Truth, have freely gathered together in the common desire 
to develop fitly each his own most diverse nature. That 
is an ideal education ; though we all admit it is impracticable 
and impossible in the days of our nineteenth century. 

What a gulf separates this from the actual education that 
we see and admire ! No academic grove, but a barrack 
with regiments drilled like Prussian guards, every man of the 
whole five hundred or thousand polishing up the same lines, 
translating the same author, filling up every hour of the day 
with the same monotonous task, anxious about the next in- 
spection, and eager to win promotion by rigid punctuality, 
and mechanical precision in drill. And the master and phi- 
losopher himself is now a drill sergeant, bound to repeat the 
regulation lesson, to exact minute discipline in thoughts, 
himself worn into a machine by eternal inspections, exami- 
nations, and formal observance of regimental orders. He, 
poor man, neither thinks nor observes; he neither judges his 
pupils in his mind, nor pretends to put them in touch with 
his own. He analyses, digests, serves out, and compels the 
repetition of the particular book or scheme of inquiry that 
for the moment is in vogue in his particular academy. It is 
not for him to think : he has to repeat. He has to tell his 
pupils what the favourite authority in history, philosophy, or 
science, has said in his last book, and to see which of his 
pupils repeats the lesson with the greatest accuracy. Tons 
of written answers have to be " marked" each week or month ; 
and the teacher is concerned, not with pupils, but with 
"papers." As if the repetition of what some learned man 
has written were knowledge, or as if the being drilled into 
uniformity by a dozen regulation tutors were the same thing as 
being inspired by the free suggestions of one powerful mind. 



THOUGHTS ABOUT EDUCATION 325 

No one denies that drill is good in its place, for certain 
purposes; and so is discipline, punctuality, and rigid order. 
It all has fine moral uses for many natures ; it can turn out 
troopers, artillerymen, and able seamen; and a dockyard, 
a factory, or a fire-brigade would be failures without it. 
But the question now is, if it can equally well educate minds, 
characters, imaginations, and hearts; whether we may not, 
in the spiritual and intellectual spheres, overdo the discipline, 
the uniformity, and the formal task. The question is, if 
young natures may not be stunted thereby, and growing brains 
choked, inflated, or sterilised. Yet, having carried out 
modem education to the highest point of elaboration and 
pressure that flesh and blood can sustain, we keep on calling 
for a still more intricate set of regulations and for more pro- 
fessional experts (as the jargon has it), more incorrigible 
"educationists." 

What is the reason for all this ? for our age is neither per- 
verse nor foolish, and reason there must be at bottom. The 
reason for our practice goes very deep down, and takes us 
into the spiritual foundations of human society. But then 
education must go deep down, and is akin to the innermost 
soul of social phenomena. The reason for our practice, I 
hold to be, that education must normally rest on moral and 
religious motives, and is inextricably bound up with our ideals 
of duty in life, and our sense of the place of the individual in 
the world around him. We all admit that we are now hope- 
lessly divided and in doubt about moral and religious ideals, 
about the motives to do our duty and our conception of man's 
present and future, in our reading of the voice of Providence 
and our estimate of a noble life. And, being so hopelessly 
divided into a thousand schools of opinion, we are resolved 
to rest education on purely intellectual bases, to surround it 
with material and pecuniary motives, to limit it "to what will 



326 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

pay," and to what we can bring to the visible test of " marks" 
by the first two rules of arithmetic. 

It is to be hoped that the New World may be spared some 
of the evils which so fatally trammel education in the Old 
World. Some of the social and historic sources of these 
evils are peculiar to Europe, and unknown on the western 
side of the Atlantic. In England, at least, education has 
to be organised on almost rigid social strata; lower-class, 
middle-class, upper-class schools being strictly divided ac- 
cording to the wealth and social position of families. No 
"gentleman" ever enters an "elementary" school; no work- 
ing man ever enters a "public school," as by an ingenious 
euphemism the exclusive seminaries of the rich are still 
described. And if a middle-class, or "commercial" school be 
not absolutely closed by expense or convention to the poor 
or to the rich, the rare and casual exceptions are not enough 
to break the rule that "intermediate education" means the 
teaching of the lower middle-class which are not artisans 
and are not called "gentry." I am not prepared to say how 
this could be altered at once in such a country as England 
with its ancient and complex social conventions, habits, and 
hierarchy. But it is still true that to graduate education, 
from the age of nine to that of twenty-one, into strict ranks of 
the rich, the comfortable, and the poor, is to poison education 
in its roots, and from a social and moral point of view to 
make it an instrument for corrupting the mind. It was not 
so when there was a true education, in the ancient world or 
in the Middle Ages. And the bare idea of dispensing know- 
ledge by castes or in money grades would have scandalised 
Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, Epictetus and 
Plutarch, to say nothing of St. Bernard, Aquinas, Dante, 
and Petrarch. 

Having got all wrong by this fundamental sin of appor- 



THOUGHTS ABOUT EDUCATION 327 

tioning out education to "gentlemen," to tradesmen, and to 
artisans, in the "public school," the commercial "academy," 
and the board school, all kinds of evils have been generated 
and increased. Pride of caste forces those who aspire to the 
term of "gentlemen," the governing class, which monopolises 
commissions in army and navy, the superior grades of the 
public service, the Church of England, and the learned pro- 
fessions — pride of caste forces them to cling to a "classical" 
education in its old pedantic form, the quoting of Latin 
without false quantities, and the writing of doggerel in Greek 
or Latin verses. I remember a lad at a public school who 
spent a weary afternoon over one Latin hexameter. This 
was the result, — 

Cantabo laudes Martis, Venerisqufi lascivae. 

At some of the most successful schools in England, boys 
spend whole terms in hammering out disgusting nonsense 
like this, before they have read a single classical author, or 
can construe a page of Ovid and Virgil. A few of the boys 
are clever enough to catch the trick of longs and shorts, just 
as child gymnasts learn to balance themselves on the trapeze 
and the tight-rope ; and these infant phenomena grow up to 
win prizes, scholarships, and honours, and turn into ignorant 
and shallow men. So far from this mental gymnastic in 
parrot-like imitation of the classical authors conducing to a 
love of ancient literature, it is my firm belief that the high- 
pressure system of composition pot-hunting destroys all real 
interest and knowledge of the great works of antiquity. 
Many a brilliant scholar has never opened Polybius or 
Strabo, Theophrastus or Plutarch, and the day after his last 
examination he is anxious to be rid of his classics along with 
his battered cap and his ragged gown. 

I have so often already tried to point out the essential vices 



328 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

of the examination system, that I will not return to it, save to 
say, that, the more I see of it the more do I feel that it is ruin- 
ing education altogether. Mechanical examination never 
can test any knowledge worth having : all that it can do is to 
debase and pervert education. The pupil has before him an 
end, which is not knowledge or mental culture of any kind, 
but success, money, applause, and superiority. The teacher 
has before him, not the improvement of his pupils' minds, 
but their "fitness" for the race; and those who set the 
papers (often the scurviest professional hacks) practically 
order the teacher what he has to teach. There are no doubt 
some ideal forms of examination which might be made fair 
tests of knowledge ; as if a thoroughly competent teacher were 
left free to judge not more than a dozen or a score of students, 
and had a week or two and a free head to go about it in his 
own way. But this we know is impracticable. There is 
no time; it would be too costly; and we will not trust any 
one's impartiality. When we speak of academic examina- 
tions, we mean five hundred students writing like stenog- 
raphers for four or five days, at six hours -per diem; the papers 
being "marked" mechanically under severe pressure by 
three or four overworked experts who never saw the pupils 
before, and are forced to pass or pluck them as a barrack 
surgeon does recruits. 

The source of this shocking parody on education is at 
bottom a moral one. Wanting moral and religious motives 
and guidance in education, we fall back on material ones. 
We supply the pupil with coarse pecuniary stimulants; we 
will not trust the teacher unless we can calculate his results 
in figures, and prove his competence by the addition of 
marks. We trust neither pupil nor teacher, and we give 
both low aims and ideals, and not high ideals and aims. And 
the same distrust of our moral control over education tends, 



THOUGHTS ABOUT EDUCATION 329 

in England at least, to foster the monstrous exaggeration of 
muscular exercise, which is now become a serious part of the 
educational scheme at schools and colleges. Boys and youths 
are prone enough to overrate their amusements without any 
stimulus, and need no teaching to put their studies as a bad 
second to their games. And now the modern schoolmaster 
and tutor snatches at gymnastics as the sheet-anchor of 
morality. He enforces games to the grave injury of boys' 
health, preaches from his pulpit the apotheosis of racing and 
football, in the feeble hope that by exhausting the body, he 
will make discipline easier, and check moral abuse. 

The entire "public school," or barrack system, the college 
or cenobite system, as practised in England, with all their 
unnatural consequences and their essentially material spirit, 
may be, as things are, necessary evils, but they are thoroughly 
abnormal and vicious in principle. The normal and noble 
education can only be given in families, and not in barracks 
or convents. The moral, religious, and social stimulus of 
education ought to rise mainly there, and its groundwork 
should come from the parents. That the parents, as it is, 
are unfit, unworthy, unwilling to do it, absorbed as they are 
in the struggle for existence and the race for gain, is the shame 
and grief of our materialist habits, for it does not release the 
parents from their duty. They can only hire experts to do 
their work, and test the experts' skill by the number of prizes 
that their pupils can bag, and the thousands of marks with 
which they can be credited. 

It is too true now that few families can really give a high 
education, and few young persons can educate themselves even 
with assistance and opportunity. But there is no other way. 
The groundwork of education must be laid at home, and the 
essentials of education must come from the learner himself. 
The guidance, the inspiration, the higher organisation, of 



330 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

education belong no doubt to superior and special teachers. 
But only the rare superior spirit is worth much. The rank 
and file of hack teachers do more harm than good, except, it 
may be, in the mechanical rudiments of learning, which are 
hardly needed after the age of fifteen. From about that 
time of life it is guidance and inspiration that is needed, not 
hammering, cramming, and punishing. As years increase, 
what is wanted in education is far more freedom, individual- 
ity, diversity of bent, more leisure than we see now in the 
programme of any "educationist," nay, I will not hesitate 
to say it, more indulgence of any high taste, mere day-dream- 
ing, if you will, in a word, more rest and peace. Education 
may help a man to form his mind : it cannot make it for him, 
though it may twist it or crush it. And that education will 
be best which honestly acknowledges how little it can do 
outside the home, how small is its power for good compared 
with the natural and acquired forces of each man's brain and 
soul. 



VI 

EDUCATION VERSUS EXAMINATION 

{From "The Nineteenth Century," 1888) 

My point in this discussion is : — that, having been called in 
to aid Education, Examination has grown and hardened 
into the master of Education. Education is becoming the 
slave of its own creature and servant. I do not deny that 
examination has its uses: I do not say that we can do with- 
out it. I say, that it is a good servant, but a bad master; 
and, like good servants turned bad masters, it is now bully- 
ing, spoiling, and humiliating education. 

Those who teach are the proper judges of what should 
be taught, how it should be taught, and what are the results 
of teaching. One of the methods by which they have 
sought to test the results of their own teaching was by examina- 
tion — one of the methods, an instrument to be used with dis- 
cretion, moderation, and freedom. This expedient (a mere 
subordinate expedient) has silently grown into a system; it 
has perpetually enlarged its own jurisdiction ; it has stiffened 
into a special profession ; it has created a body of specialists 
called Examiners. As a body, the class of special examiners 
are younger men, of less experience, and, except in ele- 
mentary schools, of inferior learning, as compared with 
teachers as a class. They very soon evolve an artificial and 
professional skill, and set up hard, narrow, technical tests. 
Their business is not to teach; but to test whether the 
teachers are teaching and what the learners are learning. 

331 



332 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

This forces the learners not to attend to their own teachers, 
but to find some way of satisfying the examiners. Examina- 
tion papers, not text-books, come to be the real subjects of 
study ; the aim of the student is to get an insight into the 
mind of his examiner, not that of his teacher ; and to master, 
not the subject of his study, but that artificial skill of pass- 
ing examinations. Thereupon grew up another class of 
specialists — the Crammers. Their business is, not to 
teach, nor to test teaching; but to enable students to pass 
the tests. This soon became an art of its own, as artificial 
as playing whist, or the violin. So, in the cricket field, 
having called in professional bowlers to practise, it became 
necessary to call in professional "coaches" to teach the de- 
fence of the wicket. And in the result. Education is tending 
to become a highly exciting match, not so much between 
the players as between the "bowlers" and the "coaches." 
The Teachers are slowly thrust out and controlled by the 
Examiners; they in turn are checked and dodged at every 
turn by the Crammers; so that learning is fast passing into 
the grasp of two classes of specialists, neither of whom are 
teachers, nor pretend to teach. 

I have myself had experience both of teaching and of 
examining for more than thirty years, in more than one 
University, and in several places of learning. Though not 
belonging to the special class of examiners, I have constantly 
been occupied with examining, have worked much with 
examiners, and have had no small experience of the practical 
working of the system. I need hardly say that I regard the 
special examiners as a most acute, energetic, and conscien- 
tious body of men : and I say the same of the crammers as 
a class. Both do their work with great ability and conspicu- 
ous honesty. It is not the men; it is the vicious system 
which is in fault. Every teacher knows by experience that 



EDUCATION versus EXAMINATION T,^T, 

when he has to take his place in the examination curriculum, 
he has to submit to the system, and he does his best to prac- 
tise the examining "art." And when, as every teacher nowa- 
days must, he has to turn crammer, he tries to acquire the 
crammer's art? — omnes eodem cogimur. Teachers, ex- 
aminers, crammers, and students, all have to take their 
place in the vast examining machine, which, like the Prussian 
military system, grinds out a uniform pattern. The huge 
examining mill grinds continually, and grinds very fast, un- 
like the mills of the Gods — but the grain it casts aside: 
it is designed to grind out the husk. 

I do not say that we can do without examinations; nor 
do I object to all examinations, under any condition. My 
complaint is confined to the incessant frequency of examina- 
tions, the growth of the practice into a highly artificial 
system, the creation of a profession of examining, and its 
correlative the profession of cramming, the wholesale, me- 
chanical, and hurried way in which the examinations are 
held, and the subjection of teaching to examining. In sum, 
I complain that the trick, the easily acquired and cheaply 
purchasable trick of answering printed questions, should 
now so largely take the place of solid knowledge and be 
officially held out as the end of study. 

I shall say nothing about elementary schools. As these 
are compulsory by law, supported by rates and taxes, and 
administered by the State and public bodies, and above all 
teach mainly the mere rudiments, there may be reasons for 
an organised system of examination which do not apply to 
the higher education. Here the examiners are clearly su- 
perior in learning to the teachers; the curriculum itself is 
more or less mechanical and capable of mechanical tests; 
and a certain uniformity may be inevitable, and a certain 
standard of efficiency must be tested. I do not approve 



334 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

of our present system of examining in elementary schools. 
But I desire to say nothing about it. 

Nor shall I say anything about the physical effects of 
over-pressure by examination. It is not my subject and I 
leave it to others, merely adding, as is plain, that at least 
nine-tenths of any over-pressure on students arises from 
examinations and not from simple study. Nor shall I say 
anything about official appointments. I have no special 
theory or plan to support. As a rule, I think people whom 
we trust to govern must be trusted to select capable agents. 
If we cannot trust them to do this, let us not trust them 
to govern us. If examinations are required to restrain 
jobbery, I prefer to deal with the jobbery face to face and 
by direct means, and not to pervert all public and private 
education, in order to checkmate the wicked jobbers, and 
reward the best crammed ones. 

Nor am I called upon here to devise a counter project 
and to suggest other tests than examination for distinctions 
and prizes. The distinction and prize system is already 
absurdly overdone; and nineteen-twentieths of the tests are 
wholly needless, or rather actively mischievous. We want 
neither distinctions, prizes, nor tests in anything like the 
profusion in which they are now poured out. Art, learning, 
politics, and amusement are deluged with shows, races, 
competitions, and prizes. Life is becoming one long scramble 
of prize-winning and pot-hunting. And Examination, stereo- 
typed into a trade, is having the same effect on Education 
that the betting system has on every healthy sport. I do 
not deny that teachers may usefully examine their own 
students as a help to their own teaching. I do not say there 
may not be one public and formal examination in any pro- 
longed educational curriculum. My plea is against that 
organised, mechanical, incessant, professional examination. 



EDUCATION versus EXAMINATION 335 

by which education is being distorted and the spirit of healthy 
learning is being poisoned. 

Examination, like so many other things, is useful as long 
as it is spontaneous, occasional, and simple. Its mischief 
begins when it grows to be organised into a trade, and the 
be-all and end-all of its own sphere. The less the student 
be "prepared," in the technical sense, the better. The more 
free the examiner be to use his own discretion with each 
examinee, the more likely he is to judge him fairly. It was 
so once. All this is now changed in the thirty or forty years 
since the examining mania set in. The myriad examina- 
tions which now encompass human life have called out an 
army of trained examiners who have reduced the business 
to a complicated art as difficult and special as chess. Like 
chess-playing, the art of examiner and examinee has been 
wondrously developed by practice. The trained examinee 
has now learned to play ten examination games blindfold. 
He can do with ease what the most learned man of the old 
school could not do. Gibbon would be plucked in the 
Modern History school. Arthur Wellesley would never get 
into the army. And Burke would have got low marks, 
through not apportioning his time to the various questions 
in the paper. 

I seriously doubt if many of our great scholars, our famous 
lawyers, historians, and men of science could "floor" off- 
hand a high-class examination paper. They would not put 
their knowledge in the sharp, smart, orderly, cocksure style 
which so much delights the examiner. They would muddle 
the relation of shire-moot to the hundred-moot, or they would 
forget the point in Smith v. Jones, or they might differ from 
the examining board as to the exact number of the Isomeric 
Amyl Alcohols now known. All this your trained examinee, 
well nursed by thorough crammers, has at the tips of his 



336 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

fingers. He "floors" his paper with instinctive knack — 
seeing at a glance how many minutes he can give to this or 
that question, which question will "pay" best — and trots 
out his surface information and his ten-day memory in neat 
little pellets beautifully docketed off with i, 2, 3, (a) (/3), (7), 
the "five elements" of this, the "seven periods" of this 
movement, and the wonderful discovery (last month) of a 
new reading by Professor Wunderbar. 

Of course all this does not take in the examiner. He 
knows that the student does not know all this, that this is 
not the wealth of the student's reading, or the product of 
the student's native genius. But what can he do? His 
task is to set questions, and the student's task is to answer 
them. If the questions on paper are answered right, cadit 
qucBstio. The examiner's business is not with what the stu- 
dent knows, but with how many questions he can answer, 
and how many marks he can score. The examiner may 
see that he is not examining the students so much as the 
teachers, or perhaps the crammers. All that he can posi- 
tively say is, that the candidate has been brought to the 
post perfectly "fit." The student may be writing down 
mere "tips" from memory; but if he makes no slip, and he 
has been carefully crammed, the examiner has to admit that 
he has got his marks. The examiner may doubt if the 
knowledge is real, or is worth anything. He cannot state 
that the man has failed. If he had time and opportunity 
he could easily ascertain that point. 

But in many examinations there is no viva voce allowed; 
in most examinations the public viva voce is not thought 
decisive, owing to nervousness, temper, accident, and vari- 
ous points of temperament and manner. Few examiners 
now care to decide by viva voce; which in any case is done 
in a hurry and imder disturbing conditions that destroy its 



EDUCATION versus EXAMINATION 337 

value as a real test. An examiner has rarely the chance of 
trying a candidate with a fresh paper, or of giving him as 
many quiet verbal questions from time to time as he might 
like. There is no time, there is no opportunity. There are 
the rigid rules; the candidate is not accessible at the time 
wanted ; he cannot be got into a state perfectly composed, 
easy, and master of himself. A quiet afternoon or a morn- 
ing's walk would settle it all. But the clock goes round; 
the Machine grinds on ; the list must be out in a few hours ; 
the examiners cannot sit disputing for ever ; an average must 
be struck, time is called, and down goes the candidate's name 
— usually, be it said, "with the benefit of the doubt." 

This is no fault of the examiner. His task is very diffi- 
cult, trying, and irksome. None but trained men can per- 
form it ; and it is wonderful how much trained men can do, 
and with what patience and conscience they make up their 
lists. But the higher examiner now has to mark on an aver- 
age, in a week, from 2000 to 3000 questions, perhaps from 
4000 to 5000 pages of manuscript. In this mass he has to 
weigh and assess each answer, and to keep each candidate 
clear in his mind, throughout eight or ten sets of papers. He 
is lucky if he can do this with less than ten hours per day of 
work at high pressure — reading in each hour, say from fifty 
to a hundred pages of manuscript. He can no more waste an 
hour, or follow up a thought, than the captain of an Atlantic 
liner can linger in his ocean race. The huge engine revolves 
incessantly; the examiner's mark-sheet slowly fills up hour 
by hour till it looks like a banker's ledger; some fifty or a 
hundred candidates get into groups, of Jones, Smith, Brown, 
etc., or else Nos. 7695, 7696, 7697, etc., and soon Jones, 
Smith, Brown, are labelled for life. 

What a farce to call this Examination ! Any sensible 
man who wanted to engage a confidential secretary, or a 



338 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

literary assistant, or a man to send on some responsible 
mission, would not trust to a mark-sheet, so mechanical, so 
hurried. He would see each candidate once or twice alone 
for an hour or two, talk quietly to him, get him to talk quietly, 
leave him to write a short piece, set him to do a piece of 
actual work, try him backwards and forwards in spontaneous, 
unexpected ways, as the quality of each candidate seemed 
to suggest. He would not burden himself with more than 
four or five candidates at a time. At the end of a week, a 
sensible man could perfectly make up his mind which of the 
four or five was the best fitted for the particular work required, 
and he would almost certainly be right. 

Nothing of this is possible in the official Examination. 
The "rules" are stricter than those of a prison. There is 
absolutely no "discretion." Discretion might let in the de- 
mon of Favouritism. The candidates are often numbered 
and ticketed like prisoners, to avoid the disclosure even of 
names. The precise number of papers is prescribed, and 
their preposterous multiplication leaves the examiner about 
one minute for each page of manuscript. With one or two 
himdred candidates to get through in a week or ten days, 
the examination is really like the inspection of a regiment. 
The uniform and accoutrements must conform to the regu- 
lation standard. 

It is supposed that examiners are masters of the situation 
and have a large range for a free hand. It is not so. The 
examiner's mind runs into grooves, and a highly skilled class 
have sorted and surveyed the possible field. In each sub- 
ject or book there are only available, in practice, some few 
hundreds of possible "questions." The system of publishing 
examination papers, and close study of the questions over 
many years, have taught a body of experts to reduce, classify, 
and tabulate these. So many become stock questions, so 



EDUCATION versus EXAMINATION 339 

many others are excluded as having been set last year, etc. ; 
and in the result a skilled examinee, and still more a skilled 
crammer, can pick out topics enough to make certain of 
passing with credit. Knowledge as such, and knowledge 
to answer papers, are quite different things. Student and 
examiner read books on quite different plans, if they wish to 
gain knowledge, or if they are thinking of the examination. 

The memory is entirely different. The examinee's mem- 
ory is a ten-day memory, very sharp, clear, methodical for 
the moment, like the memory cultivated by a busy law- 
yer, full of dates, of three different courses, of four distinct 
causes, of five divisions- of that, and six phases of the other. 
It is a memory deliberately trained to carry a quantity of 
things with sharp edges, in convenient order, for a very 
short period of time. The feats which the examinee can 
perform are like the feats of a conjurer with bottles and 
knives. The examinee himself cannot tell how he does it. 
He acquires a diaboHcal knack of spotting "questions" in 
the books he reads. He gains a marvellous flair for what 
will catch the examiner's attention. As he studies subject 
after subject his eye glances like a vulture on the ''points." 
Examination is a system of " points." What has no " points " 
cannot be examined. Many able and industrious students 
do take the trouble to acquire this flair; some will not, or 
cannot, acquire it. But certainly a good many acquire it, 
by an outlay of labour or money, who are neither able nor 
industrious at all. 

A man going through the full school, college, and pro- 
fessional career now passes from ten to twenty of these ex- 
aminations, at intervals perhaps of six months or a year. 
From the age of ten till twenty-five he is for ever in presence 
of the mighty Mill. The Mill is to him money, success, 
honour, and bread and butter for life. Distinctions and 



340 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

prizes mean money and honour. Success in examinations 
mean distinctions and prizes. And whatever does not 
mean success in examinations is not education. Parents, 
governments, schools, colleges, universities, and departments 
combine to stimulate the competitive examination and the 
mark-system. None quite like it; but all keep up the 
tarantula dance — "needs must when the devil drives." 
The result is that the Frankenstein monster of Examination 
is becoming the master of education. Students and parents 
dare not waste time in study which does not directly help 
towards success in the test. 

One hears of the ordinary lad at school or college, either 
as amusing himself because "he is not going in this year," 
or else as "working up very hard for his examination." He 
is never simply studying, never acquiring knowledge. He is 
losing all idea of study, except as "preparation" for examina- 
tion. He cannot burden his memory with what will not 
"pay." And a subject which carries no "marks," or very 
few "marks," is almost tabooed. Books are going out of 
fashion; it is only analyses, summaries, and tables which 
are studied. But published examination papers are the real 
Bible of the student of to-day — nocturna versanda manu, 
versanda diurna. 

Next to old examination papers, the manuscript "tips" 
of some famous coach form the grand text-books. One of 
the ablest men I ever examined, who bitterly complained 
that he had failed in a coveted distinction, was told that he 
had not read his books on a given subject. "Why!" he 
said indignantly, "he had not read the text-books; but he 
had mastered a valuable volume of 'tips' in manuscript, 
which was said to contain every question which could be set 
in a paper." He failed through pushing the system too far; 
and a tragedy was the end. 



EDUCATION versus EXAMINATION 34I 

The Examination, thus made the "fountain of honour," 
governs the whole course of study. If the teacher takes up 
a subject, not obviously grist for the great Mill, the students 
cease to listen, and leave his classes. The instant he says 
something which sounds like an examination "tip," every 
ear is erect, every pen takes down his words. The keen 
student of to-day is getting like the reporter of an evening 
journal: eager after matter that will tell, will make a good 
"answer," capital examination "copy." The Mill governs 
the whole period of education, from hie, hcec, hoc, to the 
final launch in a profession. I know little boys of ten, in 
the ego et Balhus stage, who are being ground in printed 
examination papers, which I could not answer myself. And 
big men, older than Pitt when he governed England, or 
Hannibal when he commanded armies, are still ruining their 
constitutions by cramming up "analyses," and manuscript 
"tips" of great "coaches." 

The result is that poor little urchins in frocks are in train- 
ing for some "Nursery stakes," as an old friend of mine 
used to call the trials of preparatory schools. The prize 
schoolboy who sweeps the board on Speech-day often gets a 
perfect loathing for books, and indeed for any study that is 
not "cramming"; and the youth who leaves his University, 
loaded with "Honours," may prove to be quite a portent of 
ignorance and mental babyishness. He has learned the trick 
of playing with a straight bat the Examiner's most artful 
twisters. But he cannot bear the sight of a book ; and, like 
any successful speculator, he has a hearty contempt for mere 
knowledge. 

Examiners are very clever men; but they ought not to 
form a sort of "Ministry of Education," controlling on one 
uniform and mechanical scheme the entire field of educa- 
tion. Examining is more irksome, less continuous, and 



342 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

worse paid than teaching. Hence, as a rule, the professional 
examiners are hardly men of the same experience, learning, 
and culture as the professional teachers in the highest grades. 
They have not devoted themselves to special subjects of 
study; they do not know the peculiar difficulties and wants 
of the student ; they are not responsible for the interests of 
a given branch of learning. A body of professional exam- 
iners, moving about from great educational centres, tend 
to give a uniform and regulation character of all learning. 
Our educational centres are yet in far too chaotic and fluid 
a stage themselves to justify them in stereotyping any system. 

Knots of clever, eager trained "experts" in the examining 
art are being sent about the country from Oxford and Cam- 
bridge, marking, questioning, classing, and certifying right 
and left, on a technical, narrow, mechanical method. They 
would be far better employed in learning something useful 
themselves. As it is, they dominate education, high and 
low. They are like the missi dominici of a mediaeval king, 
or the legates a latere of a medieeval pope. They pitch the 
standard and give the word. Public schools revise their 
curriculum, set aside their own teachers, and allow the 
academic visitor to reverse the order of their own classes. 
The Mill sets a uniform type for the University. Colleges 
give way and enter for the race. One by one the public 
schools have to submit, for prizes are the test; and success 
means prizes. Next the minor schools and private schools 
have to follow suit. And at last the smallest preparatory 
school, where children in nursery frocks are crying over qui, 
qucB, quod, has to dance the same tarantula. 

For this state of things the remedies seem to be these. 
Let examinations be much fewer — they are ten times too 
numerous. Let them be much more free — they are over- 
organised, over-regulated. Give examiners more time, more 



EDUCATION versus EXAMINATION 



343 



discretion, more room. The more the teachers are them- 
selves the examiners the better; the less examining becomes 
a profession and a special staff, the better. Do not set 
examiners to test teachers, as well as students; do not set 
up mechanical rules whereby to test the examiner. Believe 
that it is possible to learn without any prize, money, or re- 
ward in view. Trust the teacher; trust him to teach, trust 
him to examine. Trust the examiner, and do not set up a 
Mill. Above all, trust the student. Encourage him to study 
for the sake of knowledge, for his own sake, and the public 
good. Cease to present learning to him as a succession of 
races, where the knowing ones may land both fame and 
profit. 



VII 

LITERATURE TO-DAY 

When I am asked (as happens to-day) to respond to "the 
toast of Literature," — optimist, or, rather, meliorist, as I 
am, I fall into a quite pessimist vein, and sing in a very- 
minor key. As I look back over the sixty years since I 
first began to read freely for myself, English Literature has 
never been so fiat as it is now. There never was so copious 
a torrent of sound English, sterling sense, industrious learn- 
ing as there is to-day ; but as to the witchery of form, native 
humour, mother-wit, creative genius — ah ! how poor is the 
sum! 

In my student days — say the mid-'forties and mid- 
'fifties — our poets were Tennyson, the two Brownings, 
FitzGerald, Rossetti — all at their zenith. So were Dickens, 
Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton, Kingsley, Disraeli. The Brontes, 
Trollope, George Eliot, Swinburne, Morris, were just coming 
into line. Year after year Ruskin poured out resounding 
fugues in every form of melodious art. Our historians were 
Carlyle, Grote, Milman, Macaulay, Kinglake — then Froude 
and Freeman. Our philosophers were Mill, Spencer, Buckle, 
Newman, Hamilton, Mansel. As I look back over these 
sixty years it seems to me as if English Literature had been 
slowly sinking, as they say our eastern counties are sinking 
below the level of the sea. Where shall we find an Arnold, 
a Pater, a Symonds, a Stevenson, such a fascinating his- 
torian as J. R. Green — such "a first-class fighting man" 
as Thomas Huxley? 

Compare an early number of any one of the Reviews 

344 



LITERATURE TO-DAY 345 

with any number of to-day. We shall find some seven to 
ten papers in any old number, each written in literary form; 
measured, thoughtful, filling a sheet, it may be two sheets, 
of print. To-day there will be seventeen or twenty-seven 
scrappy bits, tumbled out of the writer's note-book, and 
half of them signed by leaders of fashion or society ''lions." 
Style, literary shape, and any more than fugitive purpose 
are flung aside. A name which the public can recognise, a 
"breezy" bit of gossip, is what the reader wants — is all that 
he has time to notice. Railroads, telegrams, telephones, mo- 
tors, games, "week-ends," have made life one long scramble, 
which wealth, luxury, and the "smart world" have de- 
bauched. The result is sixpenny magazines, four-and-six- 
penny novels, "short stories" in every half -penny rag — 
print, print — print — everywhere, and "not a drop to 
drink" — sheets of picture advertisements — but of litera- 
ture, not an ounce. 

I am free to say this, because I am myself just as bad as 
any one, being quite indifferent to literary form. I do not 
pretend to be "a man of letters," and I felt the truth of a 
critic in the provincial Press the other day when he said of 
me, "the absence of literary style from his writings had 
conveyed a wrong impression of him to most of us"; and 
he kindly said that, in spite of having no style, I was a rather 
nice gentleman. Yes ! as I said in my little Memoir, my 
business is to teach, to moralise, and reform, or to try to do 
so ; and I am so intent on the matter in hand that I just 
blurt it straight out, and do not pretend to be what in the 
provinces they call a "stylist." But I think there ought 
to be stylists, and that a fine literary style is a thing to be 
desired ; a form which enables true thoughts to be remem- 
bered, to live, and to work, without which even sound ideas 
fail to become lasting. 



346 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Now, why is good literature disappearing ? The causes 
are complex, subtle, deep, and wide. They are — the in- 
crease of material appliances vulgarising life, and making 
it a scramble for good things. Next comes the vast multi- 
plicity of numbers tending to uniformity, crushing indi- 
viduality, flattening us out into a crowd of equal units. 
Lastly, comes the sudden spread of a low and mechanical 
instruction. Life has become infinitely faster, easier, ma- 
chine-run; less spontaneous, less jovial, far uglier. The 
huge agglomeration of similar beings in our abnormal cities 
weighs upon the sense of personal independence. The mass 
of fellow-citizens, at once our equals, and our rivals, is too 
overwhelming to struggle against. We all have to conform 
to the fashion of the day. We dare not cut our coats or our 
collars to please ourselves: we are swept away by the irre- 
sistible torrent of "what everybody does now." The won- 
derful spread of what is absurdly called Education, but 
which is really nothing but the mechanical instrument of 
real culture, instruction in the "Three R's," has evoked an 
endless supply of vapid, dull stuff. Fifty times the print 
is poured out now than was done two or three generations 
ago. The bulk of it is of the same washy type. That 
type, by its mere volume, sets the "fashion." To ignore 
the type is to be "old-fashioned": to defy it is to be "a 
crank." And so the literary currency is debased. 

Take the machine-made life we lead now. Steam, elec- 
tricity in a thousand forms, telephones, motors, typewriting, 
photographs at every turn ; nobody writes a legible hand ; 
we dictate twenty scrawls a day, where our ancestors would 
write one charming letter. We do not saunter about a 
lovely countryside, lingering over every new landscape, 
listening to every bird and watching every living thing; we 
rattle over it at twenty-five miles an hour, leaving a bad 



LITERATURE TO-DAY 347 

smell behind us and seeing nothing in front for our blue 
goggles. Every journal, or catalogue, or tradesman's bill 
we touch is disfigured with coarse, bad photographs. The 
grocer puffs his wares, the tobacconist puffs his cigars, the 
quack puffs his "diuretic pill" with the image of his own 
ugly mug. Novels have to be short, cheap, "up-to-date," 
and photographic. On the stage we want a live donkey 
and real smoke. How can Literature flourish in a world so 
mechanical, so commonplace, so uniform ? 

If Gibbon or Macaulay were to publish to-day, the aca- 
demic critics would jeer at them for not knowing Professor 
Rumpelstiltzkin's last pamphlet on the "Dolichocephalic 
Races." If Scott were to publish Ivanhoe, we should be 
told it was "a bad joke"; old-fogyish in form and obsolete 
in local colour. What pays now for romance is Divorce 
Court scandal, the smart set on a motor-trip, or slum-talk 
in the East End. Photography and mechanics have forced 
Art, Literature, even Society, into a crude, monotonous 
realism. In pictures, in books, in conversation, what we 
must have is the minute reproduction of the obvious, com- 
monplace things we see and hear every day. Imagination 
bores us: originality puzzles us: quiet grace is voted "in- 
sipid." When Carlyle in 1840 was advocating the London 
Library he said: — "The purveyor of popular literature 
must have an eye to the prurient appetite of the great million, 
and furnish them with the kind of garbage they will have. 
The result is melancholy — making bad worse ; for every 
bad book begets an appetite for reading a worse one. Thus 
we come to the age of pinch-beck in Literature." What 
would the Sage of Chelsea say to-day ? 



VIII 

"FORS CLAVIGERA" 

The final Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, 
in thirty-six volumes, has now reached his great serial and 
autobiographical medley called Fors Clavigera. More than 
anything "the Master" ever wrote, it may be called a "hu- 
man document" — one of the most original, most frank, 
most tantalising in all modem literature. A book so mysteri- 
ous has been judged with curiously different minds. Noth- 
ing "so notable," said Carlyle. "Watery verbiage," said 
the Spectator. "Studies in reviling," said a fine poet. 
"Ruskin's 'Hamlet' and also his ' Apocalypse,' " said his 
biographer in the "Men of Letters" series; and the editor 
himself now cites and adopts that judgment. Whatever else 
it may be, this huge book of 650,000 words, written month 
by month between 1871 and 1884, is the man, John Rus- 
kin's self. 

The Introduction to Vol. XXVII. (pp. 17-90), by Mr. 
E. T. Cook, contains the most elaborate biographic study 
of the whole series, and throws new and invaluable light on 
this extraordinary torrent of self-revelation, fierce Jeremiads, 
and dazzling fantasies. It may well be called a "Hamlet,'' 
an "Apocalypse," for it is now the profound moan of a 
somewhat morbid genius, now the inexplicable vision of 
some inspired prophet. The inexhaustible labour of the 
editor has cleared up a thousand dark allusions, and has 
traced the curve of these fulminating flashes of lurid light. 
We now begin to see the mental connection between wood 

348 



"fors clavigera" 349 

hyacinths, the battle of Marathon, and the match tax. 
There has never been since the commentaries on Scripture, 
or Cromwell's Letters, or Coke upon Lyttelton, any editing 
done with such minute industry and scrupulous reverence 
of the written word. And the written word Fors still remains 
one of the most Apocalyptic in our literature. Here Ruskin 
is only by fits and starts the expounder of Art. Poetry, 
Education, Religion hold the first place. He is the social 
reformer, almost the Communist, the prophet of a new 
Economic Utopia, the Evangelist of a new Gospel of the 
Old Faith. 

And now, as one who has deeply enjoyed Fors, and, per- 
haps, somewhat excessively rated it as Ruskin's central 
work, I am bound to make a personal confession — almost 
a belated recantation. Like the rest of the world, even of 
the Ruskinian world, I was myself far too busy between 
the years 187 1 and 1878 to be sending 7d. every month to 
Keston and to read through the pamphlets regularly, even 
when they contained paternal rebukes on myself. The only 
Fors I ever really read and knew was the edition in four 
volumes, small cr. 8vo., 1896. This handy edition reduced 
the eight full volumes to four moderate volumes of 500 
pages, omitted all the Appendices, and much curtailed sun- 
dry parts of the ninety-six letters. I am free to confess 
that I greatly prefer the abridged Fors to the unadulterated 
torrent we now get, overlaid with cuttings from the Daily 
Telegraph and provincial prints, stuffed with silly letters 
from anonymous correspondents and the gossip of aesthetic 
old ladies. The abridged and bowdlerised Fors was trivial 
and desultory enough in all conscience. But the "pure 
milk" of the Ruskinian word is to me a puree which my 
palate declines to approve. 

Nor can I agree with the view that Fors should be read 



350 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

as a whole consecutively. It may be judged as a whole; 
but as to reading it right through, one might as well try to 
read through the Encyclopedia Britannica volume by volume. 
I suppose no one but a reviewer has ever done this, and, 
I fear, not all of them. For my part, I read it through in 
the shorter form when I wrote Ruskin's Life; and I have 
now read it again in the new longer form. But it does not 
gain in the process. The incessant digressions, the wild 
flights of fancy, the lyrical eulogies followed by furious 
anathemas of indispensable things and illustrious persons, 
and all this incoherent irony and commination — not with 
the merry badinage of Elia or Titmarsh, but in fierce earnest 
and passionate hot-gospelling — make Fors a book to dip 
into, to take up in a mood as desultory as that of the writer, 
but not a book to study seriatim and to digest from cover to 
cover. 

Yet to open it in the same "fortuitous" way, how delight- 
ful, how stimulating, how devotional is its spirit ! We see 
a much-tried soul, to whom the extreme beauty of Nature 
and of Art — beauty that he felt with an intensity of passion 
that none of us can reach — was yet dust and ashes whilst 
man's life remained so sordid, so gross, so cruel, whUst man's 
cupidity marred and vulgarised God's handiwork. What 
a noble thirst for a true "education," a real training of heart 
and character, eye and nerve, not a mechanical readiness 
to read — mere printed rubbish, to write accounts and a 
merchant's puffs of his "faked" wares! What a deeply 
religious spirit lay in this heart, half crushed by early Calvin- 
ism and then bewildered by modern rationalism, which it 
was too eager ever to understand, and too imaginative ever 
to study. 

If one would see how serious, how practical, how truly 
spiritual Ruskin's teaching could be at its best, we should 



FORS CLAVIGERA" 351 

turn to Mr. Jolly's excellent volume, Ruskin on Education. 
Himself an expert in education, as one of H.M. Inspectors of 
Schools, Mr. Jolly has had the happy idea of collecting into 
one little volume Ruskin's teaching on this subject, mainly 
using Fors. It was a fertile thought, and has been M^ell 
executed. He shows us how Ruskin conceived Education, 
not a mechanical trick which could be, and too often is, 
misapplied, but a moral training of the nature along with 
a training of the senses and the bodily powers. Ruskin 
here, as Mr. Jolly shows, came nearer to Plato than any 
modern, at least any English, teacher. 

And yet, when one has recognised all this noble spirit, all 
this genius, this heroic martyrdom of the social reformer 
who flung away his fortune, his life and peace, his passion 
for Art, in order to purify the world around him — what 
a sense of failure, of waste, of despair rings through all the 
lyrics and ironies of Fors, as the undertone or key whereon 
its melodies are built. He who was for ever preaching to us 
humility, submission, trust, was the most ungovernable, 
wilful, arrogant of men — in a high sense, the most utter 
egotist. He who cried out to men to obey and to follow; 
would follow or obey — no one but himself. He who was 
ever calling on us to learn would never learn anything but 
in his own way — all de novo — ah ovo — as if no man before 
him had ever learned anything, or ever taught anything. 

'Twas a grand nature, a rare genius, sadly trammelled 
by a vicious education, an obsolete religion, an indomitable 
self-will — cruelly wasted by an ill-regulated passion which 
only too often broke through the bounds of perfect sanity. 



IX 

THE CENTURY CLUB 

{From " The Cornhill Magazine, ^^ 1903) 

The pleasant paper in the August number of The Cornhill 
Magazine, 1903, wherein Sir Algernon West recorded a few 
recollections of the Cosmopolitan Club, very naturally sug- 
gested to some veterans of the Century Club of the 'Sixties 
to gather up stray reminiscences of that society before the 
surviving members follow it into the great majority. The 
Century Club cannot boast the antiquity of fifty years claimed 
by the Cosmopolitan; it was merged more than twenty 
years ago in the National Liberal Club; nor can it pretend 
to such a roll of celebrities as Sir Algernon's graceful memory 
can recall. 

The Century Club was essentially a political, not a social, 
club, with a very definite purpose and a strongly marked 
colour. That colour was the ardent faith of the younger 
politicians who believed in Gladstone, Bright, Mill, Goldwin 
Smith, John Morley, and Herbert Spencer, in the Fighting 
'Sixties. Those were the days of the "Essays and Reviews" 
and Dr. Colenso polemics in the Church, of the fight to open 
the Universities to Dissenters, the fight over National Edu- 
cation, about Church Rates, State Churches, and Reform 
of the Suffrage. It embraced the period of Mr. Gladstone's 
ascendancy in the House of Commons and his first two 
ministries, the Reform Act of 1867, the Irish Church Dis- 
establishment Act of 1869, the Education Act of 1870, the 

352 



THE CENTURY CLUB 



353 



Irish Land Act of 1870, and the long struggle over the 
Trades-Union laws, which was closed (only temporarily, it 
now seems) by the Acts of 1871 and 1875, 

The resignation of the Liberal leadership by Mr. Glad- 
stone in 1875, t^G apotheosis of Lord Beaconsfield in 1876, 
and the Imperial Durbar he inaugurated in the years from 
1876 to 1880, threw a certain damper over the Century Club, 
which had lost many of its foremost politicians. And on 
the foundation of the Eighty Club the Century was ulti- 
mately merged — we may say, perhaps, was developed, 
enlarged, and glorified in the sumptuous palace at White- 
hall Place, where its surviving members utter their hopeful 
Floreat. 

I was myself one of the founders of the Century Club — 
indeed I think that I first originated the idea, which was 
talked over in my chambers in New Square, Lincoln's Inn, 
in 1866. Among those who took an active part in the foun- 
dation were Charles S. Roundell, who had been secretary to 
the Jamaica Commission and to the Universities Commission, 
who was secretary also to Lord Spencer in Ireland in 1869, 
and has represented Grantham in 1880, and the Skipton 
Division of the West Riding in 1892. Another was Henry 
Yates Thompson, well known for his munificent founda- 
tions, who contested South-west Lancashire as colleague of 
Mr. Gladstone in 1868. And one of the most active pro- 
moters was the Hon. E. Lyulph Stanley, long Vice-Chair- 
man of the London School Board, who represented Oldham 
in 1880, and is now Lord Stanley of Alderley (1908). All 
four of us were young barristers with some leisure, and were 
in close touch with the politicians, members, and journalists 
in the party of Gladstone, Bright, Mill, and Forster. 

All of these statesmen are gone now. Their place and 
their party know them no more. As in 1908 I turn back 

2A 



354 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

in memory some forty years, I am sadly reminded how 
many of our comrades are gone, how wide is the gulf between 
those days and our own, how different are the ideals in the 
ascendant, the dominant spirits, the burning questions. 
How we should have shouted in derision at any one who, in 
1867, had talked of converting the people to the gospel of 
"Dear Bread and Glory!" The ideal of the "Century" 
was not an imitation of the Cosmopolitan, except in form. 
It was to uphold definite and very strict principles of pohtical 
and religious liberalism. It was to help fight the battles 
which Gladstone and Bright, Mill and Spencer, were fight- 
ing in Parliament and in public opinion. It was to have, not 
a social character, but a political and intellectual character. 
It was to consist not of celebrities, or of pleasant fellows, but 
of keen workers in the causes of freedom of thought and 
popular progress. Like the Cosmopolitan Club, it met at 
9 P.M. on Wednesday and on Sunday nights. It met only 
to smoke, to talk, and to organise. The only refreshments 
were mineral waters; I am inclined to think — not even 
whisky. 

Adopting the material form of the Cosmopolitan Club 
so far as meeting only for conversation on two nights of the 
week, it differed from the Cosmopolitan and most other 
clubs I have known in being a mere political and latitudi- 
narian tabagie, as Carlyle calls King Frederick's smoking 
council. I have never touched tobacco in my life, except 
in the reek of other men's weeds ; but such was my reforming 
zeal in my hot youth, that I consented to be poisoned nightly 
in the good cause. None of us, I think, were smokers; 
but we agreed to make this concession to human weakness, 
though we barred alcohol, I think, out of regard for Sir 
Wilfrid Lawson. It was understood that candidates were 
not to be ineligible simply because they did not employ 



THE CENTURY CLUB 355 

a fashionable tailor, and working men were to be as welcome 
as noble lords. Every member of the club was to be free 
to address any other member, with or without introduction 
or acquaintance. And every view was to be tolerated, for 
freedom of speech was an absolute principle. 

I think the Club began, and existed some years, without 
any printed rules, and indeed without rules at all. The 
preliminary meetings were held in Lincoln's Inn, I think in 
the chambers of H. Yates Thompson, who was the first 
honorary secretary. Among the earliest members were 
(Lords) Bowen, Davey, (Sir) George Osborne Morgan, 
George Shaw-Lefevre, Henry Fawcett, Sir Charles Dilke, 
M.P., Thomas Hughes, M.P., Mr. Leonard Courtney, 
Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, Sir George Trevelyan, A. C. 
Humphreys- Owen, M.P. for Montgomeryshire, who was the 
second honorary secretary ; T. B. Potter, M.P. for Rochdale, 
the friend of Cobden and Bright, and founder of the Cobden 
Club; James Bryce, M.P., (Sir) Leslie Stephen, Professor 
Huxley, Professor Beesly, Montague Crackanthorpe, K.C., 
(Sir) Charles Cookson, Mr. (Justice) Wright, John Morley 
— and of course Lord Houghton. 

The Club was unlike ordinary Clubs, either political or 
social, in that it offered nothing but a talk on two nights in 
the week, when Parliament was not sitting, and was a kind 
of Caucus to effect definite political, social, and ecclesiastical 
reforms, without distinctions of class, or tastes, or social 
habits. I was myself a member of the Cosmopolitan Club 
in 1871, and have been a member of the Reform Club; 
of the "Dominicans," who dined on Sunday night at the 
"Cock," under the inspiration of Mr. Mill; of the Meta- 
physical Society, under that of Tennyson ; and of the Political 
Economy Club. But my experience is that the Century 
differed from all, in that there were no meals to be had in it, 



356 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

no blackballing on grounds of personal fancy, and there were 
practical measures in Church and State to be discussed and 
supported. If the Club expired long ago, it was because 
its work was done, and almost every purpose it sought to 
effect had been fully accomplished. We are in a different 
world to-day — autres hommes, autres mceurs. And now that 
I have taken my name off these and many such societies and 
clubs — now that, in the peace of my rural retirement, I am 
trying to recall the roaring 'Sixties of Mr. Gladstone's earlier 
administrations, I see dimly through the haze of time that 
we played an honest and, I trust, a useful part. 

We were anything but "Passive Resist ers" in those days; 
and of course we soon drew the fire of Conservatives and 
Theologians of all shades. We were roundly abused, and 
absurdly caricatured as Nihilists, Atheists, and general 
Firebrands. One peculiarity of the Club was that its 
principles were for emancipation at once political, social, 
and religious. In that age of agitation about Tariff Reform, 
Labour Laws, Hyde Park Meetings, Church Rates, Dis- 
establishment, Religious Tests, and Indian Imperialism, 
when Mr. Mill sat in Parliament for Westminster, and Mr. 
Gladstone was rejected at Oxford, the political, social, and 
religious questions were inextricably mixed. Most of the 
founders of the "Century" were, or had been, Fellows of 
Colleges, and they were in close touch with the Reforming 
party in the Universities. It was natural that the Church 
party in them should look with suspicion upon the London 
Club. One of the best epigrams of the day was a sentence 
from Tacitus, which Dean Mansel proposed as a motto for 
the Club — Corrumpere ef corrumpi SAECULUM vacatur. 

Of course, the Oxford myth that the Club was a society 
of Freethinkers, banded together to destroy the Church, 
was a ridiculous gibe. Many Liberal clergymen were mem- 



THE CENTURY CLUB 357 

bers, such as William Rogers, "Bishop of Bishopsgate," 
Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln, Professor Thorold Rogers, 
the present Dean of Ripon, the Rev. Llewellyn Davies, a 
recent Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, and the Rev. Samuel 
Harvey Reynolds, a well-known journalist and author, and 
other University Professors and Tutors. I think most of 
those who took active part in freeing the Universities from 
religious tests were members of the Club, as were also most 
of the writers in the two volumes, Essays on Reform and 
Essays for a Reformed Parliament, of 1867. The Club was 
for some years a sort of recruiting ground whence were 
gathered members of the Cobden Club, and writers in the 
Liberal Press. Mr. Thomas Bayley Potter, M.P., was a 
frequent attendant, as were Frank H. Hill, lately Editor of 
the Daily News, Mr. Herbert Paul, Sir John Macdonell, 
and Mr. Samuel Butler, the ingenious author of Erewhon. 
Many of the men active in politics, literature, and journalism 
on the Liberal side, between 1865 and 1880, were members 
of the Club. But as, in my rustic solitude, I cannot get 
access to any printed lists of members, I am unable to give 
a more complete or accurate roll. 

I do not remember that, in the earlier days at least, there 
were any printed documents at all. There was a candidates' 
book in manuscript, which I am told, when the Club was 
wound up, fetched ;^6 : 16 : 6 at auction for the autograph 
market. And cheap at the price; for the book must have 
had some interesting signatures. One of the most regular 
attendants and one of the loudest talkers was the late Henry 
Fawcett, who would occasionally cause some laughter by 
giving his opinion about persons who were in the room and 
within hearing. But it was Liberty Hall; and all opinions 
and all persons were equally free. 

The mode of election was peculiar. Members were 



358 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

selected by a small committee, which had to be unanimous. 
There was no ballot, but one veto barred the election; and 
candidates could be continually submitted for selection by 
the committee. I believe that Lord Davey, and at least 
three others of the present Judges, and several Privy Coun- 
cillors of to-day, have at times served on the committee of 
selection, as, I think, did Professor Huxley, Sir Charles 
Dilke, the late Warden of Merton, and the present Lord 
Stanley of Alderley. The sine qua non was not so much 
eminence, clubbable gifts, conversational brilliance — but 
the pure milk of Liberal doctrine. As tests of the "pure 
milk" of the Liberal Word vary a good deal, and as public 
men not unfrequently change their views (as indeed we see 
to-day!), it is to be feared that so rigid a scrutiny caused 
some ructions. 

Peers, as such, were not excluded, but their Liberalism 
was closely tested. The seventh Lord x\irlie. Lord Amberley, 
Lord Brassey, the inevitable Lord Houghton, and others, 
were accepted. There is a "saga" that a well-known Duke, 
who once sat as a Liberal in the House of Commons, was 
held to be not quite up to the high temperature of the Radical 
thermometer. Our dear old Lord Houghton once gave us 
an impassioned appeal "to give our days and nights to 

literature," 

Vos exemplaria Graeca 
Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna. 

"You should feed on the best authors, go to sleep on them, 
dream of them," said he, in a sort of after-dinner speech. 
The discussion went on till a speaker observed his Lordship 
fast asleep in his chair over the fire. "Yes," he said, "the 
noble Lord is still dreaming of the best authors." 

The Club began its meetings in a rather hugger-mugger 
way, as a casual lodger : first of the Alpine Club near Charing 



THE CENTURY CLUB 35g 

Cross; then in the rooms of a ''Captain" somebody, who 
was said to be a bill-discounter ; and eventually in Pall Mall 
Place, in an old seventeenth-century room which was vera- 
ciously affirmed (by the owner) to have been once the 
drawing-room of Nell Gwyn. The Club thereupon broke 
out into Ladies' Evenings, those days being the age of Mr. 
Mill and the "Subjection of Women." The subjection of 
Man, at any rate of Century Club Man, followed not long 
after these orgies. The founders married, got too old, or 
at least declined to debate Bills in Parliament at 2 A.M. 
I and others took off our names. I am told that the Club 
was eventually expanded into the National Liberal Club, 
which, along with the Eighty Club, now extends its hospi- 
tality to such survivors of the "Century" as did not slide 
into Unionism at the great secession of 1885-86. 



P.S. — Other members, I am told, were : — 

Walter Bagehot. Vernon Lushington, K.C. 

Dr. E. Caird. Walter Pater. 

(Sir) Andrew Clark. (Lord Justice) Rigby. 

Arthur Cohen, K.C. Lord St. Maur. 

Hon. Henry Cowper. Henry S. Smith. 

(Sir) Henry Cunningham. Thomas Chenery. 

(Sir) George Dasent. Herbert Spencer. 

Albert Dicey, K.C. (Sir) James Stansfeld, M.P. 

(Sir) M. E. Grant-Duflf. J. Addington Symonds. 

(Sir) Joshua Fitch. Professor John Westlake. 

Sir Alexander Grant, Bart. James Woolner. 

(Sir) Courtenay Ilbert. Sir George Young, Bart. 

(Sir) Godfrey Lushington. Albert Rutson. 



X 

SIR LESLIE STEPHEN 

In Memoriam (1904) 

{From "The Cornhill Magazine, ^^ April, 1904) 

Not a few of us have lost in Leslie Stephen a wise and 
generous spirit — one who recalls to us forty years of strenu- 
ous devotion to letters, a memory which goes back to the 
stalwart men of the mid-Victorian epoch — those spacious 
days of Mill and Spencer, Carlyle and Ruskin, Matthew 
Arnold and Stevenson, Tennyson and Browning, Bright and 
Gladstone. They are all gone. And he who knew them all, 
and at times interpreted them to us and at times would wrestle 
with them himself, is gone to join them in the true Temple 
of Peace and Conciliation — where those who have taught 
aright speak still with a more solemn voice, and, by some 
mysterious influence, speak henceforth with a more mellow 
and harmonious voice. 

As, on Wednesday, February 24, in the sombre chapel at 
Hendon, the coffin stood on the bier in its violet covering 
before the portal of the crematorium, the profound silence 
was charged deep with a thousand memories to the friends 
who were gathered for the last time around him. There 
were men and women who had grown to old age in close 
touch with him — who had worked with him, worked for 
him, argued with him, received help from him, enjoyed 

360 



SIR LESLIE STEPHEN 361 

life with him, who had loved him, whom he had loved — 
men who had served the State, or served the people, who had 
governed provinces, formed schools, written their names in 
the roll of statesmanship, literature, and science for the best 
part of two generations. Stephen's last book, composed, we 
might say, on his very death-couch, appeared to the public 
almost on the day of his funeral. He died literally in harness, 
as the Roman emperor said a general should die, erect and 
in his armour. But the inner memory of Leslie Stephen 
will remain for us his coevals as a stalwart of the mid- 
Victorian age. 

I have been asked for a few reminiscences of Stephen, 
more especially as to his relations to the Cornhill Magazine, 
begun by his father-in-law, W. M. Thackeray, and to the 
enterprising house with which he was so long associated. 
Without pretending to be one of his intimates, my friendship 
with him dates from his first settling in London, some forty 
years ago ; and ever since we have been treading somewhat 
similar paths. He was my junior in age by one year. We 
both were students at King's College at nearly the same time. 
We had many friends in common, and saw much the same 
society. We belonged to the same clubs. We were both 
the presidents of ethical societies, and occasionally spoke 
on the same platform. I heard him speak at the Alpine 
Club, and had many a mountain walk with him. We 
ascended together Mont Blanc with his two famous Ober- 
land guides, Melchior and Jacob Anderegg, with whom I, 
too, have had many a glorious climb; I have tramped with 
him, also, on the Surrey Downs, and in many a mid-day 
jaunt in Kensington Gardens, or in some midnight stroll 
home from the Cosmopolitan, or the Century Club, or 
Metaphysical Society. We were for some thirty years col- 
leagues in the management of the London Library. We 



362 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

used to meet at one time daily at the British Museum, for 
we have both known the cares of an editor; and I even 
planned, edited, and in part indited a minuscule dictionary 
of universal biography, a mere lilliputian contemporary — 
longissimo intervallo — of the stupendous Dictionary of 
National Biography. With no pretensions myself to his wit, 
his learning, his judgement, and prodigious industry, it is 
with heart-felt sympathy that I try to jot down my memories 
of one whom I respected so entirely and admired so heartily ; 
with whose life I was in touch at many points. 

For the ancestors, family, parentage, and young life of 
Leslie Stephen we happily have what is for the earliest years 
a chapter almost of his own autobiography, in the opening of 
his memoir of Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen, his brother. It is 
one of his most delightful and genial pieces. In telling us 
all that he could learn, and all he thought we would care to 
hear, as to the origin of the Stephen family, as to their charac- 
teristics, ways, and ups and downs of life, Leslie was prac- 
tically writing it for himself as much as for his brother, the 
judge. Much more is that the case in his admirable picture 
of his father, Sir James Stephen, and of his mother, the 
daughter of an almost historic family of Puritan ministers 
of the Gospel. Leslie, far more than Fitzjames, inherited 
his moral and intellectual nature from his parents and their 
ancestors. Like the Gladstones, the Carlyles, the Ruskins, 
the Stevensons, and the Mills, the Stephens were a family 
of Scotch Lowland descent. From his father he drew his 
literary versatility and grace, his industry, his tolerant, 
precise, and judicial instinct. From his mother he drew the 
grit and courage with which the Venns for three centuries 
witnessed to the Truth — from his mother came the affec- 
tionate spirit which the grit never repressed nor even con- 
cealed — and that paramount grasp of ethical honesty, that 



SIR LESLIE STEPHEN 363 

disdain of vain parade, which was his most salient charac- 
teristic through life. 

The famous motto of the Dictionary of Biography — "no 
flowers" — was quite typical of his whole nature. And one 
who ventures to write a reminiscence of him, now that he is 
no more, is bound to keep this injunction ever in mind. We 
went to Hendon to say farewell to our friend — not to praise 
him; and we should have been hurt had we seen his coffin 
smothered in wreaths and what the reporters call "floral 
tributes," Nor shall my tribute be floral. As he asked once, 
with some indignation and with unusual asperity: "Can 
you not praise the dead man sufficiently unless you tell lies 
about him?" No one ever more disdained superlatives, 
and more insisted for himself and for others that the plain 
truth should be set down in the simplest words. 

Stephen's connection with the Cornhill Magazine, with its 
editorial work, and with the late Mr. George Smith and his 
publishing house, was very long and very close. For some 
seventeen years (1866-1883) he was a constant writer in 
those pages. For eleven years (1871-1882) he was Editor. 
He married the daughter of the first editor, W. M. Thackeray, 
whose other daughter, Lady Ritchie, long continued to con- 
tribute. When Mr. George Smith decided to publish the 
great undertaking known as the Dictionary of National 
Biography, Stephen retired from the Cornhill to become the 
editor of the Dictionary. It was in the Cornhill Magazine 
that appeared the series of papers which afterwards became 
one of his best books, together with a vast number of other 
essays, known or unknown, collected in volumes or not 
reprinted. 

I have had the opportunity of consulting the careful record 
of every article and every writer in the Magazine, kept with 
extreme care and accuracy by Mr. George Smith in his own 



364 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

hand. These monthly diaries, so punctually and methodi- 
cally kept by the head of a great house of business over so 
long a period, form a striking proof of the zeal and thought 
which the famous publisher bestowed on his literary under- 
takings. In studying the catalogue of the books of standard 
reputation which first appeared in this monthly serial, and 
in going over the list of the contributors, with so large a 
proportion of the best writers of the Victorian age, it is note- 
worthy how little there is of merely fugitive work, and how 
largely the Magazine has been the cradle of some of the best 
literature of its time. 

Stephen's first pieces in the Magazine seem to have been 
in 1866 — one on "American Humour," and another on 
*' A Tour in Transylvania." I think the first was that which 
introduced English readers to some of those familiar bits of 
American drollery which are still current. In the next year 
(that of his marriage) came the delightful paper called "The 
Regrets of a Mountaineer," which we all know in the Play- 
ground of Europe, published in 1871, and frequently reprinted. 
The serio-comic chagrin of the veteran mountaineer, as he 
ruefully watches others climbing the snowfields he cannot 
now reach, owing to "circumstances he need not explain" — 
(we easily see that he was then on a honeymoon trip) ; his 
pathos over the joys which were denied him : — 

A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. 

This is, indeed, delicious. 

All Stephen's Alpine pieces are delightful, full of his 
"saving common sense," his hatred of superlatives and ec- 
statics, with his sound advice that the best amateur climber 
is inferior to an average peasant, with his deep passion for 
Nature, and his hearty sympathy with the Swiss guide at his 
best. Of all these pieces I most enjoy "Sunset on Mont 



SIR LESLIE STEPHEN 365 

Blanc," published in the Cornhill, October 1873. Only 
practised climbers can understand the difficulties of watching 
the sun set in August from the actual summit of Mont Blanc, 
and then returning in the dark — difficulties which Stephen 
neither conceals nor exaggerates. But the piece has a depth 
of thought, a solemnity, even a poetry, which is too rare in 
his critical pieces. 

Stephen's long series of critical studies of the eighteenth 
century writers began in 1868, with "Richardson" and "De 
Foe" (the Cornhill Magazine, January and March) ; but 
the "Hours in a Library" was not opened until May 1871. 
Throughout the year 1869, the Magazine was constantly 
occupied with the papers by a "Cynic." "The Cynic's 
Apology" opened in May 1869. Then came "Idolatry," 
"Useless Knowledge," "The Decay of Murder," "National 
Antipathies," "The Uses of Fools," "Social Slavery," 
"Literary Exhaustion," and many others. He closed the 
"Cynic" series on becoming editor, and, I think, did not 
reissue them. He was right. They were full of Stephen's 
genius of common sense, his quaint humour, his contempt for 
extravagance, his disgust for false sentiment and artificial 
gush ; but they are not his best, nor do they reflect his higher 
thought. Leslie was no cynic; he had no love for cynics; 
he thoroughly saw of what affectation and egoism professed 
cynicism is manufactured. Leslie was closer to Thackeray 
and Lowell than to Swift. He had a deep" vein of sentiment 
and enthusiasm, which he kept battened down in the hold. 
The Cynic papers are worth rereading, but they do not add 
to his reputation, nor do they truly represent his mind. 

It seems that Stephen began to edit the Cornhill Magazine 
in April 187 1, and during the next ten years he contributed the 
"Hours in a Library," which has been so often reissued, and 
forms, perhaps, his most popular and characteristic work. 



366 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

And during the same period he contributed the four papers, 
"Rambles among Books," 1880-1882. The "Hours in a 
Library," and the "History of English Thought in the 
Eighteenth Century," the volumes on Pope, Johnson, Swift, 
and George Eliot, are so well known, that nothing need here 
be said of them, and they are studies far too elaborate to 
be discussed in these hasty reminiscences. What I would 
specially commend is the great body of excellent and perma- 
nent literature which the Cornhill Magazine contained during 
Stephen's time as editor. These included "Literature and 
Dogma," and several essays by Matthew Arnold, poems 
by R. Browning, W. M. Thackeray (posthumous). Sir F. 
Doyle, and Alfred Austin. There were romances by George 
Meredith, Miss Thackeray, Erckmann-Chatrian, Charles 
Lever, Mrs. Oliphant, W. Black, R. D. Blackmore, Thomas 
Hardy, Henry James, Mrs. Lynn Linton, and James Payn. 
Most of these romances continue to hold the public; and 
some of them are among the best and most popular achieve- 
ments of their authors. But that of which the public is 
perhaps less aware is the great number of essays contributed 
by R. L. Stevenson and W. E. Henley. It was one of 
Stephen's most cherished memories that he had discovered 
and encouraged the rare gifts of these two men, whose lit- 
erary career had opened under such crushing difficulties 
of poverty and ill-health. 

Altogether I reckon that Stephen contributed to the 
Cornhill Magazine, from 1866 to 1883 inclusive, forty articles 
on general subjects, apart from the critical and biographical 
studies collected in his published works. Several of these, 
I think, might with advantage be reissued. They deal with 
natural scenery, topography, social and ethical criticism, 
literature and the writers of the day. As befitted a mis- 
cellany of the kind, they hardly touch on politics, science. 



SIR LESLIE STEPHEN 367 

philosophy, or religion. Among the most interesting essays 
are, I think, those entitled "Useless Knowledge," with its 
humorous proposal for a new Society for the Suppression of 
Useless Knowledge (the S.S.U.K.), which, he said, would 
give us more leisure to learn what would be of some use. 
"Social Slavery," "Our Civilisation," "Public Schools," 
"International Prejudices," "Art and Morality," "Criticism 
by a Critic," "The Moral Elements in Literature" — all 
have some excellent things, full of acuteness, humour, wis- 
dom, and fine discrimination. 

In his published works Stephen wrote at large on phi- 
losophy, ethics, and religion, but nothing on politics, art, or 
science. The latter were subjects from which he kept steadily 
aloof — not at all from indifference, but from a conscientious 
sense that he had never given his mind to them, and had an 
almost morbid horror of appearing to dogmatise in any study 
in which he could not pretend to be a "doctor." In his 
History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, his 
Science of Ethics, The English Utilitarians, An Agnostic's 
Apology, and in Religion and Ethics, Stephen treats at great 
length, and with much elaboration, the common ground of 
morals, philosophy, and religion. His general point of view 
is that of Bentham, Mill, Spencer, and Henry Sidgwick, with 
some affinity to Huxley, Darwin, John Morley, and Comte. 
Not that he can be called a follower of any one, or an entire 
believer in any system. His task was mainly expository and 
critical, rather than constructive; nor can it be said that he 
brought much that was at once new and permanent to these 
problems. They show at its best all his acumen, his para- 
mount common sense, and his shrinking from all modes of 
spiritual exaltation. They lack a large and sympathetic 
grasp on general history; they never rise to face the great 
underlying axioms of human thought and the primal statics 



368 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

of human society; and they rather mock than encourage 
what is vaguely described as "the enthusiasm of humanity." 
The whole field of thought is far too wide and subtle to be 
touched upon here. 

For similar reasons, I shall not attempt to do more than 
refer to the vast undertaking which absorbed the later years 
of Stephen's life from 1882. He planned, directed, and 
edited the first twenty-six volumes of the Dictionary of 
National Biography, for which he compiled an immense 
series of biographies. The world of letters, like the world at 
large, has so completely recognised the admirable scheme of 
the work, the unflagging labour bestowed on it, and the com- 
pleteness of the result, that not a word more need be said 
here. Every year increases the value of this truly encyclo- 
paedic work, which must remain a permanent landmark in 
the history of our literature. And, apart from all questions 
of accuracy and literary skill, we cannot fail to recognise the 
robust moral qualities displayed in so gigantic an under- 
taking both by Editor and by Publisher, in the courage, 
tenacity, and far-sighted faith to which both held fast under 
growing difficulties that few of us would care to face. 

I will say a few words about the last book of all, which 
was practically a posthumous issue of lectures that Stephen 
was not strong enough to deliver in person, and which have 
not yet been widely read. English Literature and Society 
in the Eighteenth Century was the Ford Lectures at Oxford 
in 1903, and it deals with his old familiar writers, with some 
new lights on their contemporary society. There is pathos 
in the short prefatory letter to his nephew, Herbert Fisher, of 
New College, who read the lectures and passed the proofs. 
He there speaks of "the serious breakdown in health," which 
prevented his journey to Oxford. As a fact, I visited him 
whilst on a couch he was writing the papers, struggling all the 



SIR LESLIE STEPHEN 369 

time with a cruel and painful disease. The letter itself is 
marked by Leslie's warm-hearted nature and irrepressible 
humour. It is signed "With a warm sense of gratitude, your 
affectionate Leslie Stephen." And even on his death-bed 
he cannot resist a playful allusion to "the light in which 
uncles are generally regarded by nephews." 

The book itself contains almost nothing new, and very 
Httle that shows his old passion for getting to the root of 
everything he touched. It was designed for Oxford students 
dealing with a particular century, and needing a practical 
compendium of the whole epoch. This it gives them with 
admirable clearness and neatness of form; and it is exactly 
the text -book which a student would desire to have at his 
finger-ends. It is the book which a master of the subject 
who had entire command of his memory and his judgement, 
but who was debarred from research or reference to a library, 
would be able to produce — which could only be produced 
by one who was master of his facts and his books. I came 
upon an admirable sentence, which sums up Stephen's own 
Hterary judgements : " The eighteenth century, its enemies 
used to say, was the century of coarse utilitarian aims, of 
religious indifference, and political corruption; but, as I 
prefer to say, was the century of sound common sense and 
growing toleration, and of steady social and industrial 
development." 

That is Leslie Stephen's message to our time: sound 
sense, toleration, social development. It is a worthy and 
great message. But, perhaps, it is not the whole message 
that we need. In his own field he was a consummate guide 
and a most accompHshed critic. With all his sympathy for 
Carlyle and his school, Stephen did much to correct that 
violent prejudice of the Sartorian master against the eigh- 
teenth century and its notable work. With all its short- 



37© REALITIES AND IDEALS 

comings and its want of poetry, fervour, and spiritual in- 
sight, it was the century of common sense, of toleration, of 
social and industrial development. All this, on every side 
of it, and in all its fruits, Stephen showed us in an immense 
series of special studies. He did for the eighteenth century 
almost as much as Carlyle did for Cromwell and for Goethe. 
It is the age of specialism, and Stephen was essentially a 
specialist. He was the apostle of the eighteenth century, 
saturated with its intellectual clarity and its contempt of 
fanaticism and enthusiasm, and sharing in its limitations and 
its prosaic ideals. In his own field, Stephen was all that 
we need as an interpreter, judge, and stimulus. He never 
pretended to be an all-round critic, or a guide to general 
literature, much less to the history of thought as a whole. 
His strength lay in his concentration on his own field — his 
strength, and, to some extent also, his weakness. He very 
rarely strayed outside the area of the eighteenth century, 
and the first half of the nineteenth century. And he almost 
never strayed off the field of English literature and English 
thought. We have learned nothing from him of French, 
German, Italian, or Spanish literature — much less of Greek 
and Roman poetry. We do not recall any estimate of 
Dante, Ariosto, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Corneille, Moliere, 
Voltaire, Cervantes, Calderon, Goethe, or Lessing — nor of 
Homer, yEschylus, Lucretius, or Virgil. We do not find 
that he ever studied the Middle Ages, the development of 
the Catholic Church, of the modern spiritual and religious 
renascence. Had he done this he would have given us an- 
other series of masterly studies; but we might have lost the 
Leslie Stephen whom we knew (whom the reading world 
will long continue to know and to honour) — as the standard 
authority upon one of the most fruitful epochs of English 
letters. 



XI 

FRANCIS W. NEWMAN 

(1897) 

The death in extreme old age of Francis Newman, the 
oldest and most eminent of modern Theists, should not pass 
unnoticed; for the manifold gifts and beautiful character of 
the man must deeply interest us, however much on philo- 
sophical grounds there is felt to be between us a wide gulf 
in opinion. He has suffered from that which is often the 
penalty of abnormal longevity in an age so furious after 
new things, so indifferent towards good work which it im- 
agines to be obsolete to-day. Those who outlive by forty 
years the zenith of their reputation pass away silently with- 
out a word of recognition from a new generation which has 
grown up under other influences. 

The present generation has little idea how deeply the old 
hermit of ninety-two, who has been so quietly laid in his 
Western grave, acted on the inquiring minds of the middle 
of his century. Not that he ever founded a school of thought, 
much less ever put forth a system of belief of a positive 
kind — but he exercised a certain fascination over the 
younger minds mainly by the fine traits of his unworldly 
spirit and by the singular elasticity of his genius. Our space 
would not admit even a bare enumeration of his many en- 
dowments and a mere catalogue of his books, addresses, 
verses, and homilies. Perhaps no man of our time ever 
acquired such curious stores of disparate knowledge, or 

371 



372 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

published writings on such a vast series of different topics. 
The mere Hst of these topics takes away one's breath. He 
wrote on the Higher Mathematics, on Philosophy, Phi- 
lology, Theology, Morals, Politics, Political Economy, Latin 
and Greek Poetry, Hebrew, Arabic, and Libyan Literature, 
on ^schylus, on Aristotle, on Homer, on Horace, on the 
theory of translating the Classics — to say nothing of reli- 
gious and political addresses, essays "On Diet," a Memoir 
of his brother, the Cardinal, and a Manual of Family De- 
votion. 

It is not to be supposed that, with such multifarious learn- 
ing, and such a medley of keen interests, the work is of 
equal value throughout. But few of his various pieces are 
without that rarest of qualities — the eager zeal of an acute 
mind to teach, elevate, and stimulate others. His courage, 
his simplicity, his enthusiasm, shone out in all he touched — 
be it Scholarship, Literature, Politics, Ethics, Science, or 
Religion. He never wrote a line unless he had something 
to say which he felt to be of moment and real truth, and he 
never said anything which he had not fully thought out 
for himself. As to himself, he was utterly fearless, disin- 
terested, and frank. And for some fifty years without a 
break, in spite of opposition and neglect, he has kept on 
pouring forth the overflowing of his eager brain and his 
passionate zeal after moral and intellectual Reform. 

The main work of Francis Newman has been to take a 
leading part in the evolution of religious thought out of 
that superstitious Bibliotry in which it was sunk in the first 
half of this century, in freeing so many an earnest spirit 
from the thraldom of a hide-bound orthodoxy of mechani- 
cal creed and ignorant Pharisaism. He made honest minds 
acknowledge how grossly the conventional Theology mis- 
understood and distorted the ancient Scriptures which it 



FRANCIS W. NEWMAN 373 

professed to expound. And, although Newman did not 
reach to the level of the best critical exposition of later days, 
his pure and fine feeling, his earnest and acute sense of 
truth, honesty, right and wrong, exercised a potent force 
over thousands whom he did not wholly convince or carry 
with him to the end. 

As a reconstructive power he was evidently far less suc- 
cessful than as a solvent. He has been for nearly fifty 
years the acknowledged chief in this country of the pure 
Theism of Theodore Parker, Emerson, and Kant. Theism, 
as a substantive scheme of religion by itself, has had followers 
of more philosophic and literary power than Newman; but 
it has had in our country no apostle of such long experience, 
consistency, and enthusiasm. Francis Newman preached 
the Theistic Church with all the conviction, the fervour, 
and all the devotion of self that his brother, the Cardinal, 
gave to the Church Catholic. The Church Theistic acknow- 
ledges no Hierarchy, and perhaps disdains it. But if there 
were a Sacred College of those who worship God only, 
recognising but one Divine being, and who discard both 
Scripture and Creed, the name of Francis Newman might 
hold in it a higher place than that of the Cardinal himself. 

It is difficult to think of the one Newman without the 
other, with all their startling points of contrast and of union. 
Both begin life in the same family influences and teaching; 
both are men of fervent religious feeling; both are bold, 
disinterested, eloquent, indefatigable, with the temper of 
the apostle and the martyr. Both lead new movements in 
religion, forsaking their Church, their obvious careers, their 
associates, and their early hopes. The one passes through 
agonies of doubt into the severest form of Catholic Ortho- 
doxy, of which he becomes the staunch exponent and the 
eminent Prince. The other surrenders first the Christian 



374 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

ministry, and then the Christian communion for conscience' 
sake : he lives and dies under the ban of current orthodoxy ; 
and retires into an obscure old age of labour and counsel, 
lit up only with the love and honour of distant friends and a 
few scattered communities of thoughtful men and women 
who can hardly be called a Church. The elder brother 
mounts on the top of the wave of Catholic reaction, and 
becomes a foremost pillar of a vast religious, organisation. 
The younger brother leads a far-reaching movement of 
thought which is destined in one form or other to under- 
mine the very foundations of that Church; he ends in 
obscurity and with hardly any personal following or influ- 
ence. Yet the Cardinal represents only a discredited Past, 
and Francis did something to bring us nearer to a Greater 
Future. 

In mental activity — undoubtedly in mental versatility 
and culture — Francis very much surpassed the Cardinal. 
There can be no question that, in learning and variety of 
gift, the two cannot be placed on the same level. The cen- 
tral ideas of the Cardinal's philosophy are to us so wild and 
incongruous that we can only account for them as intellec- 
tual "faults" (in the geologic sense) — abysmal fractures 
produced by a truly "seismic" act of the will. The phi- 
losophy of Francis (little as we share it) is that of a logical 
and acute mind. In poetical, literary, and polemical gifts, 
the Cardinal had a great superiority. He was a master of 
a style that had hardly any equal in his time. He was a 
brilliant controversialist, a subtle fencer, a splendid rhetori- 
cian, and a most enthralling preacher. By these popular 
gifts he has blinded the opinion of his contemporaries to his 
extravagant hallucinations and passionate defiance of com- 
mon sense and coherent thought. In coherent thought — 
the very foundation of an intellectual leader — Francis New- 



FRANCIS W. NEWMAN 375 

man was much superior to his brother. Yet our distrust of 
Catholic sophistry need not induce us to deny that the 
Cardinal lived and died a powerful religious force in his 
age; and that the apostle of Theism, having done much 
to start an important, but evanescent phase of thought, lived 
to see his early work almost forgotten, and left at his death 
little enough which is likely to come to fruit in the future. 

But the inferiority of Francis Newman to the Cardinal 
as an influence over his generation, is not to be accounted 
for solely by the great superiority of his brother as rhetorician 
and writer. That is but half the truth. There was a moral 
superiority also in the Cardinal — a force of character, an 
organic quality of brain. He had the synthetic genius in a 
high sense; whilst Francis, with all his really great analytic 
powers, had no synthetic genius at all. His learning and 
his enthusiasm, breaking forth in fifty sides at once, ended 
in becoming dispersive and dissolvent, for want of a social 
and philosophic centre to give it organic unity and concen- 
tration of active purpose. The Positivist tendency is all 
against a narrow specialism: its whole scheme of education 
and culture is for a truly encyclopaedic combination of solid 
knowledge. But then a variety of special studies, without 
an adequate synthesis, necessarily ends in dispersion; and 
dispersion means unprofitable erudition and waste of effort. 
A true synthesis — that is, a dominant social and intellectual 
philosophy, or in other words a systematic religion — is an 
indispensable condition for giving to a niultiplicity of ac- 
quirements either permanent or efficient results. 

Had not Francis Newman a religion of his own ? — it will 
be said. A religious idea — a grand and spiritual ideal of 
his own — he had. A systematic and organic social reli- 
gion he had not. This is not the place to argue again the 
whole theory and practice of what is called "pure Theism." 



376 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

To put it shortly, pure Theism means pure Self. It may 
be, if the believer is a pure and lofty spirit like Francis New- 
man, it may be an elevating ideal. But each mind makes 
the ideal for itself, and must make it differently, and colour 
it by his own nature and mind. Pure Theism, without 
Church, or history, or organisation, or Scripture, or accepted 
body of scientific belief and moral practice, can only mean 
for each of us: "What I think, what I admire." And the 
end of it is dispersion, change of front, vagueness, and pure 
Individualism. 

A Church, a Scripture, a Creed, a religious organisation 
— these mean a solid accumulation of human knowledge 
and thought, a common practice, a standard and criterion 
of conduct and belief. And all these, from the point of 
view of practical progress, are a more solid foundation than 
are personal hypotheses, however beautiful may be the hy- 
potheses, and however imperfect may be the creed or the 
Church. The Churches — whether they be based on the 
Law of Moses, or the Rock of Peter, or the Bible, or the 
Koran, or the Confucian Sacred Books, and however faulty 
each and all may be, the great organic Churches are, in a 
rude form, an adumbration of Humanity; and, in a very 
broken way, they are based on part of the great religious 
and intellectual stores of mankind. Pure Theism, whilst 
retaining as the one article of its attenuated creed the 
metaphysical hypothesis in its most transcendental, and 
therefore its least scientific and least human form, cuts 
itself adrift from historic filiation, from the accumulated 
experience and teaching of our spiritual forefathers, and 
leaves each believer free to imagine for himself the 
nature of his God and the law of the Divine Will. 
A noble spirit, like that of Francis Newman, has a 
noble image of that Divine Will. An ignoble spirit fashions 



FRANCIS W. NEWMAN 377 

it after his own temper and his own lights. That is the 
danger of pure Theism. 

The Rehgion of Humanity falls into line with the organic 
religions, having a great tradition, a systematic philosophy, 
and a working scheme of education and of conduct. It 
absorbs all that is true and social in the Catholic and other 
earlier systems; its creed is the established axioms of physi- 
cal, moral, and social science; its cult is the education of 
the soul in all humane and demonstrable truths. Whilst 
recognising in pure Theism a refined and transitory aspect 
of the metaphysical stage, it watches with keen sympathy 
and reverent honour the passing away of one who, by a 
clear brain and fine nature, did much to free an earlier 
generation than our own from a worldly ecclesiasticism and 
the ignorant idolatry of a Book which had grown to be as 
much a hindrance as a help to spiritual life. 



XII 

CANON LIDDON 

(1890) 

Though I can in no sense presume to call myself one of 
Canon Liddon's friends, it is quite true that I was his school- 
fellow more than forty years ago. I was at Oxford with 
him, too; and, widely as our lines have led us apart since 
then, I have found from time to time an affectionate wel- 
come from him; and, on my side, have never lost the im- 
pression left on my mind by his saintly youth and sweet 
graciousness of manner, even to those with whom he had 
least in common. As I am asked to do so, I will put down 
what I can remember of his early years, leaving entirely to 
others to speak of him as a man and as a priest. Yes, I sat 
beside Liddon more than forty years ago, in the Sixth at 
King's College School, for a year or two — about 1846-47. 
He was three years my senior: and the gulf that exists 
between fourteen and seventeen amongst schoolfellows is 
one not easily passed. But I sat in form next to him ; and, 
as in the Sixth we did not change places, I was his daily 
companion. 

I was fond of all sorts of games : he of none. I read all 
sorts of books : he had even then his own fixed line of thought 
and of study. He was much my senior, and very old of his 
years, so there was no kind of school intimacy between us. 
He always seemed to me an elder brother, who wished the 
young ones were more serious. But, different though our 

378 



CANON LIDDON 379 

interests and habits were, I always found him friendly, 
gentle, and considerate. What was Canon Liddon like as a 
boy of seventeen ? Well, so far as I can remember, he was 
at seventeen just what he was at twenty-seven, or thirty- 
seven, or forty-seven — sweet, grave, thoughtful, complete. 
Others perhaps may recall growth, change, completeness, 
gradually coming on him in look, form, mind, and character. 
I cannot. To me, when I heard him preaching in St. Paul's, 
or heard him speak at Oxford of more recent years, he was 
just the same earnest, zealous, affectionate, and entirely 
other-world nature that I remember him at seventeen. The 
lines in his face may have deepened; the look may have 
become more anxious of late years. But, as a schoolboy, 
I always thought he looked just what he did as a priest. 
There was the same expression of sweet, somewhat fatherly, 
somewhat melancholy interest. 

He would reprove, exhort, advise boys as a young priest 
does in his own congregation. We expected it of him; 
and it never seemed to us to be in any way stepping out of 
his own business when he gave one of us a lecture or a sharp 
rebuke. We seemed to feel that this was what he was there 
for. He was entirely a priest amongst boys. I do not 
think he ever joined in any game or even looked on at a 
game ; I am sure he never took part in the rough-and-tumble 
and horse-play common amongst boys ; and I am certain he 
never returned a blow or a practical joke at his expense. 
Nor had he any occasion to do so; for neither blow nor 
horse-play was ever practised upon Liddon. There was, I 
fancy, a kind of silent understanding that to treat Liddon 
rudely, even without intending it, would be unmanly, like 
striking a priest with his robes on. I distinctly remember 
the howl of indignation which rose when a boy, mistaking 
him for another, once roughly struck him from behind in 



380 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

a rude jest. When he turned with a look of sorrowful ex- 
postulation, without a sharp word, we felt somewhat ashamed 
of our companion; who, I think, was carried off and judi- 
cially pommelled. I lived with my own family, and he 
lived in a boarding-house; so I cannot say much about his 
life out of school hours. But I remember a legend that, on 
the occasion of some violent outbreak in his house, a sort of 
barring out or breaking out which had been planned with- 
out his knowledge, Liddon interposed with his personal in- 
fluence ; and by remonstrance and advice induced the house 
to surrender or give up the plot, before much harm was 
done. 

His school work was always well done and adequate; 
but I do not remember that he won prizes or cared to win 
any. His interests even then were entirely with theology, 
the new Church movement, and the preachers and teachers 
of the day. At seventeen, Liddon was just as deeply ab- 
sorbed in Dr. Pusey and his work as he was at twenty-seven. 
It will be remembered that this was just the moment of 
the great Tractarian agitation. King's College School was 
essentially a school for Churchmen. We were all greatly 
excited by the religious questions of the day; and most of 
us were decided High Churchmen, as I was myself, to the 
extent of giving serious anxiety to our parents. But I can 
distinctly remember that, at the age of seventeen, Liddon 
had Church opinions, as definitely formed and on much 
the same lines, as he had at twenty-seven or thirty-seven. 
And his serious studies were as much given to theology, and 
his chief intimacies were as entirely formed on an ecclesias- 
tical basis, as ever they were in later life. In the whole 
course of my life, I have never known any one who ap- 
peared to me, over a period of more than forty years, so 
entirely the same from first to last : — the same in look, in 



CANON LIDDON 381 

manner, in mind, in nature. And in frankness I must add, 
that I have often wondered how one, who, as it seemed to 
me, had so little of elasticity, of breadth, and of growth, 
should have ever commanded so great an influence. 

I knew him at Oxford, and he was always to me the 
same sweet, sympathetic, somewhat melancholy senior. He 
was taking his degree when I went into residence. By that 
time my High Church opinions had ceased to give anxiety 
to my friends, and I was slowly forming very different ideas 
of life, of man, of the world, and of religion. So that Liddon 
and I never discussed the things most dear to each of us, 
when we chanced to meet. When this happened, he was as 
sweet and as sadly affectionate as ever. And, though I 
followed his career with interest, admiration, and, I confess, 
not a little wonder, I thought it hopeless to try to get him 
to look at my point of view with interest, or even with pa- 
tience; though he would always look at the holder of it 
with kindly goodwill. Long before we had reached that 
period, I had come to feel that unless our philosophy and 
our science are right and clear, everything else will be wrong. 
But this was a position that we both felt it useless to 
discuss. 

We met from time to time; I never failed to admire his 
personal courteousness, friendly remembrance of old days, 
and sweetness of manner, even in the case of the deepest 
antagonism of thought. I used to meet him during the trial 
of Essays and Reviews, and it would be difficult to imagine 
greater antagonism of view than his and mine upon that 
subject. And meeting him in a first interview with a Jingo 
newspaper editor during the height of the controversy about 
Turks, Bulgarians, and Servians, I could not fail to admire, 
as we all did, his gentleness, courtesy, and entire command 
of himself. I abstain from saying one word about his 



382 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

opinions, as to which of course I have my own. I have 
taken up my pen only to utter a word of sorrow and of 
respect for the loss of one whom forty years ago I knew as 
a schoolboy, and who impressed all, even then, as a sweet 
and spiritual nature. 



XIII 

SIR CHARLES COOKSON 

(1906) 

On the 3rd of February died one of the original authors of 
International Policy, who was, in his earher years, asso- 
ciated with the older body of Positivists. The Times of 
5th February contained a full account of the long official 
career of Sir Charles Alfred Cookson, K.C.M.G., and C.B., 
who graduated in honours at Oxford in 1855, as an Exhibi- 
tioner of Oriel College, and, after serving in the War Office, 
was appointed, in 1868, the Vice-Consul and Judge of the 
Consular Court at Constantinople. He served as Special 
Commissioner at Athens in 1870, and at Cyprus in 1878, 
and was Consul and Judge in Egypt from 1874 to 1897. 
Both in Egypt and after his retirement in England, he took 
an active part in organising many charitable and public 
institutions — the Victoria Home for Nurses, the Sailors' 
and Soldiers' Institute, the Public Library and the Sanitary 
Board in Alexandria, and in London — the Hospital for 
Children, the Charity Organisation Society, and the Smoke 
Abatement Society. On his retirement, after thirty years 
of public services, both in a diplomatic and a judicial capac- 
ity, he was knighted by Lord Salisbury. He died at his 
house in Chelsea in his seventy-sixth year. 

To the writer the memory of Charles Cookson will ever 
be dear, as the oldest of his friends, dating from his school 
fellowship at King's College in 1846, and for his high moral 

383 



384 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

and intellectual influence continued unabated for sixty years. 
Older than myself by a year or two, he led me in my boyish 
days to care for poetry, philosophy, and religion. With 
Henry Parry Liddon, the late Canon of St. Paul's, we were 
all very High Churchmen, and Cookson was what in those 
days was called a Puseyite. Together we attended St. 
Margaret's, Wells Street, high ritualist services, until my 
parents feared I was being led to Rome. In poetry Cook- 
son led the way in devotion to Shakespeare, which I en- 
joyed as a dramatist, whilst he insisted on his supreme 
greatness as a poet. His own passion was for Wordsworth, 
with whom he had a family connection, and whose poems 
he knew from end to end. Like many a boy of fourteen, 
my own taste was rather for Pope and Byron. Many a 
literary battle did we have in time that ought to have been 
given to Thucydides and Cicero over the poetic value of the 
Excursion or the Dunciad. He and I went up together to 
Oxford and took our degree about the same time. During 
his official life abroad, we kept up active correspondence 
and met in his long vacations in Europe, and I visited him 
in Alexandria, whilst he was still busy with his consular and 
judicial work. 

The feature in his history which specially concerns me 
here is that Charles Cookson was the first to introduce to 
us in our undergraduate days at Oxford the knowledge of 
Auguste Comte. It was in the year 1851 that he brought 
me the work on Positivism by Littre, and urged me to 
master it, and also the estimate of Comte's philosophy in 
Mill's Logic. In 1851, of course, Comte's religious scheme 
was not framed, and the Politique was not written. I have 
no doubt that Cookson was the earliest Oxford under- 
graduate to make a serious study of Comte. I am not pre- 
pared to say that he ever accepted Comte's later system, 



SIR CHARLES COOKSON 385 

though he continued to read and consider the whole of his 
philosophical writings. Nor do I think that Cookson ever 
abandoned the essential principles of the faith in which he 
had been trained from boyhood, and in which as a young 
man he had been an ardent believer. But his philosophical 
power and his immense reading prevented him in manhood 
from following the steps of our older schoolfellow, H. P. 
Liddon, who soon, at Christ Church, became Dr. Pusey's 
most prominent lieutenant. 

When seven of us, with Dr. Richard Congreve as leader 
and editor, undertook to write a collective volume of Essays 
in order to treat International Relations on a systematic 
basis of morality and the supreme interests of Humanity as 
a whole, I induced Cookson to write on British relations 
with Japan. Dr. Bridges treated "China," Professor Beesly 
took "The Sea," E. H. Pember treated "India," and I took 
"France." Cookson gave a great deal of study to the then 
unknown history and character of Japan, and produced 
an essay of much interest and useful learning. When the 
volume was reissued many years after in a new edition, 
Cookson considered that his position as Consul, involving 
diplomatic as well as judicial duties of a very critical inter- 
national kind, precluded him from taking part in a work 
which certainly took very decided sides in many keenly 
contested political problems, and usually opposed all exist- 
ing official forms of policy. The omission of his essay on 
Japan was of the less importance, inasmuch as in the inter- 
vening years the whole situation and character of Japan 
had been so completely transformed. Charles Cookson will 
long be remembered by all who came in contact with him 
as a conscientious public servant, an indefatigable student, 
as a high-minded citizen, and an affectionate friend. 



XIV 

SIR JAMES KNOWLES 

{From " The Nineteenth Century,'' 1908) 

The circle of Sir James Knowles' friends was so singularly 
wide, and the esteem and affection with which in a long 
and active life he was held by his intimates have been so 
fully described by others, that I will confine my remarks 
in the few pages that his successor kindly offers me to the 
story of his brilliant success as secretary and founder of the 
Metaphysical Society, and again as founder and Editor of 
the Nineteenth Century. 

It is one of the most cherished memories of my literary 
life that I can look back to my own fellowship with that 
remarkable Society from the first, and also that for thirty- 
three years, from 1875 downwards, I can recall the kind 
and continuous consideration I enjoyed from James Knowles, 
as Editor first of the Contemporary Review, and then as 
Editor and proprietor of the Nineteenth Century. 

My whole literary career for all that period has been 
closely bound up with these two organs of thought, and a 
large part of my own published works consists of studies 
that wholly or in part first came before the public as con- 
tributions to the periodicals which were directed by James 
Knowles. In some sense he has been in literature my 
sponsor, however much he often differed from my utterances, 
which he not seldom called in others to combat or qualify. 
And it is a melancholy satisfaction to me, at the request 

386 



SIR JAMES KNOWLES 387 

of those he leaves to sorrow for him, that I seem called on 
to speak a few last words over his open tomb. 

It is sober truth that during the twelve years of its activ- 
ity, from 1869 onwards through the 'seventies, the Metaphysi- 
cal Society exercised a definite influence on the development 
of philosophical and religious thought, the indirect conse- 
quences of which are still to be traced. The idea, which 
Knowles and Tennyson started in 1868, was to bring face 
to face competent exponents of diverse theological and meta- 
physical schools in a friendly symposium, where the crucial 
axioms of their respective systems of creed and doctrine 
could be tested with the freedom of a scientific society. As 
the Royal Society opened an arena where new inventions 
and physical discoveries could be examined and analysed 
by past-masters in the natural sciences, so it was proposed 
to test and argue the validity of the new ideas which lie inter 
apices of moral and metaphysical science. The ultimate 
canons of Metaphysics are practically the data of Theology; 
and indeed it was at first designed to found a Theological 
Society. Froude declared that it would be marvellous if 
the new Society hung together for a year. But the Lau- 
reate more happily reminded him that modern science had 
taught us "how to separate light from heat." The Laureate 
was the better prophet. Some brilliant flashes of light were 
evolved with a minimum of heat, even when Cardinal Man- 
ning and Father Dalgairns came to hand-grip with Huxley 
and W. K. Clifford, when Ruskin or Abbot Gasquet met the 
two Stephens. 

An excellent account of the Society was written by Knowles 
and R. H. Hutton, editor of the Spectator, and appeared in 
the Review in August 1885. The list of the members there 
given includes the names of Tennyson, Gladstone, Dean 
Stanley, Cardinal Manning, Huxley, Tyndall, Ruskin, 



388 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Froude, Maurice, Martineau, Seeley, Bagehot, John Morley, 
Clifford, Frederick Pollock, Mark Pattison, Jolm Lubbock, 
and Mr. A. J. Balfour. And the catalogue of the papers 
read and discussed ranges from the theory of Causation, of 
a Soul, of God, Death, Immortality, Miracle, the Will, 
Matter, Force, the Absolute, the canons of Proof, Things- 
in-themselves, and Intuitive faculties. To put it shortly, 
most of the best-known thinkers and controversialists of the 
'seventies were represented, from ultra-montane Catholicism 
to materialist Monism. And all the primary ideas of philos- 
ophy and theology were more than once argued and tested. 

The papers read at the Society, together with critical 
debates in reply, frequently appeared in the Contemporary 
Review, of which Knowles was editor, and then in the Nine- 
teenth Century Review, which he founded in 1877 ^^d edited 
down to his death. For a short time indeed this Review 
was almost the literary organ of the Metaphysical Society; 
and of the sixty-two members of the Society there were few 
who, at one time or other, have not appeared as contributors 
to the pages of the Review. The rule of signed articles, 
by writers specially competent to treat the particular sub- 
ject, has been uniformly followed. And every side of every 
question has been admitted, with the guarantees of personal 
responsibility of a known writer and adequate knowledge to 
treat the matter with fairness. One very interesting form 
of discussion was, I think, started by Mr. Knowles, unless 
my memory betrays me on a suggestion of my own — viz. 
a Symposium, i.e. a succession of short papers by various 
writers from different standpoints criticising the opening 
paper and those which followed it. This original form of 
magazine -writing had for a time a deserved success. 

With the dissolution of the Metaphysical Society in 1880, 
it ceased to furnish material for the Review, which for twenty- 



SIR JAMES KNOWLES 389 

eight years has kept up the variety of its topics and the wide 
range of writers which were the distinguishing marks at its 
founding. It grew to be a Hterary power in the New World 
as well as in the Old; and has exercised a very striking 
influence not only on periodical literature but on liberal 
thought. 

In a few pages it is impossible to relate the story of a 
career of editorship of more than thirty years, with its multi- 
plicity of interests, causes, and topics, and its singular list of 
eminent contributors. None know so well as his earliest 
colleagues in this task how entirely the result was the work 
of the energy, the boldness, the versatile tact, and the genial 
sympathy of the English Brunetiere, Sir James Knowles. 



XV 

HERBERT SPENCER 

(1904) 

By the unanimous voice of English as well as foreign thought, 
Herbert Spencer was the most prominent English philoso- 
pher of the nineteenth century. It is, indeed, welcome to 
those who profoundly honoured his life and his genius, and 
who have never spared their hearty appreciation of his 
character and his achievements, to witness the general and 
spontaneous agreement with this judgement. It is a striking 
testimony to the power over men still exercised by a noble 
life of devotion to social duty, as it witnesses also to the 
ascendancy of an original and real philosopher in a world 
so saturated with every form of specialism. We who have 
never hesitated to express our sympathy and admiration for 
his work in the many sides of it wherein we could join him 
with heart and soul, as also our divergence in those where 
we could not follow him, are free to speak without hyperbolic 
encomium or guarded qualification as we note the close of a 
great career. 

The story of his life has been one of almost unparalleled 
devotion to his vast task. The annals of British philosophy 
can hardly present a similar instance of laborious persever- 
ance in a sphere where no profit and very scanty honour is 
to be won, under external difficulties so great, and, for the 
whole of his early life, in the face of discouragement and 
neglect so oppressive. Herbert Spencer often published his 

390 



HERBERT SPENCER 39I 

reasons "for dissenting from the philosophy of M. Comte." 
But he did not dissent from Comte's ideal of a great life: 
"wwe pensee de jeunesse executee dans Pdge mUr.^' The, 
philosophic detachment from all the things that ordinary 
men love and pursue was entirely the same in the English 
and in the French philosopher. Neither fortune, nor ease, 
nor weak health, nor society, nor fame, nor family, nor 
friends were ever able to withdraw Herbert Spencer from 
the fulfilment of his great and complicated task. His reward 
has been that he, almost alone of modern philosophers, has 
achieved all that he purposed, and perhaps all which he was 
capable of completing. 

In other writings I have dealt with the Synthetic Philos- 
ophy of Spencer in a more detailed and specific way. It is 
sufficient for the moment to call attention to the character- 
istic feature of it, a feature which all judges alike have noted, 
and which all have praised. Spencer stands out amongst all 
English philosophers since Bacon, in that he deliberately 
set himself to frame a Synthesis of knowledge, that is, a 
system whereby a real concatenation of all our scientific and 
moral ideas could be harmonised. To Spencer Synthesis 
always meant an organisation of the sciences, the binding 
up of all special learning into an organic unity — vitalised 
in every nerve and pore of the encyclopaedic mass by creative 
and omnipresent ideas, themselves inspired and ruled by 
one supreme conception. In this, Spencer stood alone with 
Comte. The Synthetic philosophy is (in Britain) unique. 
No British philosopher but Bacon has conceived anything 
of the kind. Preposterously unlike Bacon as Spencer was 
in character, in life, and in brain (he was even in violent 
contrast with Bacon), his critics at home and abroad are 
continually comparing him with Bacon by reason of the 
encyclopaedic nature of their studies and ideals. In this 



392 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

they are right. Spencer is our one synthetic philosopher 
of the last century. 

He certainly exaggerated Synthesis and overrated the po- 
tential range of any Synthesis. The synthesis of Comte is 
devoted to teach the impossibility of any Objective Synthesis 
of the Universe, and the necessity of limiting philosophy to 
a Subjective {i.e. an anthropocentric and geocentric) Synthesis 
of what Man can know and can do. But we can do full 
justice to the magnificent dream of a great thinker to con- 
struct a coherent Synthesis, or system of scientific and socio- 
logic knowledge, and to the heroic courage with which Herbert 
Spencer sacrificed every earthly enjoyment and reward in 
the long struggle to complete his ideal. To see the whole 
literary and scientific world of Europe and America do 
homage to this devotion to Synthetic Philosophy gives new 
hope to those who feel all the barrenness and chaos involved 
in the endless wanderings of analytic specialism. 



XVI 

HERBERT SPENCER'S ''LIFE"* 

(1908) 

It seems generally agreed that the authorised Life of our 
English philosopher forms a valuable, and indeed necessary- 
supplement to his Autobiography; and it is also agreed that 
a difficult task has been ably and conscientiously fulfilled by 
his literary executor. 

The Autobiography was not carried down beyond the year 
1882, when Mr. Spencer was sixty-two; but he was destined 
to live to December 1903, with twenty-one years more of 
life, and a life of great activity until the last few years. Dr. 
Duncan's work, accordingly, down from chapter xvi., i.e. 
the larger part of his 600 pages, is distinct from the matter 
in the previous volumes of autobiography. 

It completes, illustrates, and explains the view of the 
philosopher so elaborately drawn by himself in his own 
memoir; but it cannot be said that it gives us a different 
portrait of the man, or a new reading of his indefatigable 
life-work other than that which we had in the earlier book. 
It is a lasting satisfaction to all who love the progress of 
science and the cause of philosophic truth, to feel that, for 
our principal English philosopher of the nineteenth century, 
we now possess not only an absolutely exhaustive record of 
his entire mental and moral endowments, but also an un- 

* Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, by David Duncan, LL.D. 
Methuen and Co. 8vo. 155. 1908. 

393 



394 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

impeachable account of the genesis of his ideas and (so to 
speak) the esoteric evolution of the whole Philosophy of 
Evolution. No philosopher of ancient or modern times has 
ever had his inmost brain and heart dissected for us with 
more patient insight. And no known system of philosophy 
has ever been so elaborately probed, discussed, defended, 
and expounded, or with greater care to leave no point un- 
guarded and no misunderstanding uncorrected. 

The degree of agreement in many fundamental doctrines 
between the Positivist School of thought and Herbert Spencer 
is so large, and the honour that I and my colleagues pay to 
his vast philosophic labour has been so amply displayed, 
that it is needless here to attempt any general estimate of 
his life-work. And, again, the essential points of difference, 
wherein we refuse to accept his guidance, have been so often 
explained by myself and by others that I have no mind to 
return to them now. I will only say that, after the lapse of 
nearly five years and careful study of the Autobiography 
and the Life, for my own part I entirely hold by all that 
I said, both in his honour as in criticism, in my Herbert 
Spencer Lecture, 1Q05 (Clarendon Press. Pp. 30), as well as 
in my Philosophy of Common Sense (Macmillan, 1907. Pp. 
334-405). Both these books of mine show how profound 
was the respect which I invariably felt for his character and 
ideals over an intimacy of more than forty years; and they 
prove how fairly and courteously I argued the cardinal 
grounds on which, as a follower of Comte, I felt bound to 
state disagreement. 

The eighteenth chapter of Dr. Duncan's Life is mainly 
occupied with a controversy, at once philosophical and per- 
sonal, between Mr. Spencer and myself in 1884-85. In 
the story of minute particulars of the affair, if Dr. Duncan 
thinks them worth recording, I have not the least complaint 



HERBERT SPENCERS 'LIFE' 395 

to make, and I am perfectly satisfied to leave candid minds 
to draw their own conclusions. In my Philosophy I re- 
printed without change the articles in which I criticised 
Spencer, and I adhere to every argument therein contained. 
I am confident that I have finally refuted the idea that the 
Unknowable can be made the basis of anything that can be 
called religion; and I also unmistakably showed that Mr. 
Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy had the fatal defect of leav- 
ing no place for religion in the true sense. No thinker 
of importance has accepted Mr. Spencer's religion of the 
Unknowable, and I think the new Life conclusively shows 
us that Mr. Spencer himself came to see at last that there 
was not so much between us as he thought. 

Mr. Spencer made a real mistake (as he soon admitted) 
when he had my essays republished in America with refu- 
tations of his own in notes, without my knowledge and 
consent, and in violation of the copyright of myself as well 
as of the Review. Looking back after more than twenty 
years and reading in the Life my own letters (of which I had 
no copies), I cannot see that I remonstrated with needless 
warmth at what was in fact an unwarrantable literary offence. 
I should have been proud to publish a joint volume, provided 
I had been allowed to comment on his essays as he com- 
mented on mine — behind my back. It was a perfectly 
fair question to ask him: what was going to be done with 
the profits? It pointed to the hopeless dilemma in which 
his eagerness to engage in controversy had landed him. 
And it was absurd to pretend that this very awkward question 
affected his "honour," or that I had dreamed of charging 
him with any thought of money in the matter. I well knew 
that most of his philosophic work was truly gratuitous, as 
indeed was my own. And I was quite entitled to point out 
to him that he had overlooked the question of money ; which. 



396 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

as considerable profits were quite probable, would make 
a very embarrassing problem. The problem has never 
been solved to this day. The problem is this. Two well- 
known writers carry on a controversy over some months in 
a leading Review. One writer, without the knowledge of 
the other or of the Review, republishes all the essays of 
both writers, adding in footnotes hostile comments of his 
own upon his adversary's essays, but admitting no comments 
or replies to his own. The controversy excites much interest 
in two countries. The book sells, and profits are made. 
Both authors disclaim accepting any profits whatever. 
Quaere, what is to be done with the proceeds of sale? 

I cannot accept the view of some over-nice people, es- 
pecially amongst theologians, that controversy in any form 
is a mistake, if not positively wicked. Controversy on 
philosophical problems, fairly maintained by competent 
reasoners, is an invaluable instrument for reaching truth, 
and has been used by moralists and teachers with excellent 
effect from Aristotle and St. Paul down to Voltaire, Bentham, 
Mill, and Spencer. But the passion with which from boy- 
hood till death Spencer flung himself to refute, and often to 
denounce, any opinion contrary to his own, uttered by any 
one in the most obscure place, was rather overdone. It 
comes out more in the Life than it did even in the Auto- 
biography. It has enabled posterity more thoroughly to 
estimate his own nature and to understand his ideas. But 
it gave rather a wrong impression of his force of character, 
and it certainly wasted too much of his time. 

All the same, it is rather laughable for him or his biographer 
to complain of controversy and to talk about the "storms" 
with which he was beset. A thinker who for sixty years 
rejoiced to run counter to almost every current opinion, and 
who announced the most startling novelties of his own, 



HERBERT SPENCER'S "lIFE" 397 

need not have been surprised if those who differed from him 
expressed their dissent. Positivists have to Hve in a world 
of opposition and ridicule which they might truly call 
"a storm." Mr. Spencer was uniformly treated by us with 
profound respect. But when he gratuitously assailed 
Auguste Comte with every form of satire he was master of, 
he surely need not complain of "the storm" that fell on him 
when those who had devoted their whole lives to the synthe- 
sis of Comte attempted a respectful reply. Perhaps Mr. 
Spencer looked on Positivists as examples of the beast whom 
the French naturalist described as — tres mechant : — quand 
on Vattaque, il se defend. The biographer seems to imply 
that it was unfair, and almost immoral, to criticise Spencer, 
because criticism would be sure to rouse him to waste his 
invaluable time in making answer. 

It is a far more agreeable task to note the many funda- 
mental points on which the synthesis of Comte and the 
Synthetic Philosophy of Spencer are in unison. And still 
more is it a source of pride to us to feel how entirely we were 
at one with him in his life-long contest with the vainglorious 
spirit of War and Aggression that is the curse of our age. 
Towards the close of his life Spencer was drawn towards us 
by our appeals for peaceful industry and inter-racial justice. 
I never forget, and he never forgot, how we worked together 
with Lord Hobhouse, John Morley, and the Liberal M.P.'s 
of 1882, to form an Anti-Aggression League and to check 
that grasping ambition which led to so many crimes in 
Egypt, India, and South Africa. 

But there is a further point of common interest which the 
Life, perhaps for the first time, makes clear to the public. 
With all his philosophic differences with Comte (and I have 
elsewhere shown that he greatly overstated these differences, 
owing to his own complete ignorance of Comte's own writings, 



398 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

and of almost all philosophical literature, ancient or modern), 
ultimately Spencer settled down into what was practically 
Faith in Humanity and the Service of Man. His letter to 
myself of December 4, 1892 (p. 324), conclusively shows this. 
He refused to call it religion: he said this was ethics. And 
it was in that sense that he repudiated the Religion of Hu- 
manity. As he truly wrote to me, "the difference is a matter 
of names." The letter of December 4 turned on my reply 
to Professor Huxley, now reprinted as essay eighteen in my 
Philosophy of Common Sense (p. 308). In that essay I 
showed Mr. Huxley, that, in spite of his abusing Comte and 
repudiating his idea of religion, he was in essentials entirely 
with us in hoping for the future of humanity. Mr. Spencer, 
with these essays before him, announced substantial agree- 
ment. And I believe that both Spencer and Huxley differed 
from Comte on the problem of ethics and on the progress of 
human civilisation very much less than, in their controversial 
hours, either of these philosophers admitted or knew. 



XVII 

MUNICIPAL MUSEUMS OF PARIS 

{From " The Fortnightly Review,^' 1894) 

There are not a few things in the municipal government of 
Paris which no sensible Englishman would desire to imitate 
in London — amongst these are the wholesale demolition of 
old streets, the monotony of sundry new streets, the passion 
for a geometric plan, and the habit of renaming public places 
every few years, if possible so as to convey an insult to Con- 
servatives and priests. But there are certain things in the 
municipal organisation of Paris which are a model for the 
civilised world to follow, and which must fill Londoners 
with wonder and envy. Amongst these are the fine histori- 
cal and artistic foundations of the city, the historical Mu- 
seum and Library, the educational institutions, and the 
noble Municipal Hall, now, we hope, finally completed. 

There are at least two institutions which London may 
be said pre-eminently to need, and which have now been 
carried out in' Paris with extraordinary energy and skill. 
The first of these is an adequate Council Hall and offices; 
the other is an adequate historical Museum, a scientific 
history of the city, and an historical Library, specially de- 
voted to the antiquities of London, answering to the Mus^e 
Carnavalet of Paris. For London the difficulty arises from 
the double government, the mischievous survival of the old 
" City" in rivalry with the new city one hundred times larger. 
This nuisance is now in a fair way to be ended — a fact which 

399 



400 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

makes it all the more urgent to consider the want of a fit 
municipal building and local institutions worthy of the 
amalgamated city — the richest and most vast in the world. 

In the Guildhall, as yet monopolised by the effete Corpora- 
tion of Lord Mayor and Aldermen, London has, it is true, 
a hall which in antiquity, scale, and historic traditions is 
worthy of it, were it not disfigured by vile adjuncts and mean 
ornaments. But the Guildhall is a mere hall, and offers 
no facilities for such offices as would be needed for an united 
London government. Whether the Guildhall could be 
ultimately incorporated with a fitting municipal building, 
whether it stands on a suitable and central site, are matters 
which we need not now consider. What is certain is, that 
the offices at present connected with the Guildhall are hardly 
worthy of the old Corporation of London, and would be 
utterly unworthy of the new Corporation of London, as it is 
to be, were it not that the present London County Council 
Buildings are even more glaringly unworthy, inconvenient, 
and discreditable to our colossal and wealthy city. 

The Museum and Library at Guildhall are creditable 
institutions, but neither of them is specially devoted to 
London and its history, and they cannot be compared for 
a moment with the immense collection of the Musee Carna- 
valet; and though the old Crypt is interesting as an archi- 
tectural re He of the fifteenth century, its vaults form a most 
insufficient place to house historical objects for public ex- 
hibition. London, as soon as it is finally amalgamated and 
reorganised, will need a new City Hall and offices, and it 
ought to have a special Museum and Library for the history of 
London, and an authoritative history such as that of Paris. 
Paris now possesses these in a form more perfect and com- 
plete than any city of Europe ever had. And, using the 
experience of some recent visits, I propose to say something 



MUNICIPAL MUSEUMS OF PARIS 40I 

of the Hotel de Ville of Paris, and of its adjunct, the Musde 
Carnavalet. 

The Hotel de Ville, rebuilt since 1871, on the site and on 
the lines of the beautiful old building of Francois I., is un- 
questionably one of the most noble palaces in Europe, with 
a history that accords with the history of the city. The 
Hall of the Corporation of Paris has had its seat there for 
some five centuries and a half, ever since Etienne Marcel, 
the year after the battle of Poitiers, bought the old Maison 
de Gr^ve, as part of his vast schemes for the defence, en- 
largement, and reorganisation of the city. It is a fitting 
tribute to one of the most extraordinary men whom Paris 
ever produced, to have raised under the Hall which he 
founded the fine equestrian statue of the famous Provost 
of the Merchants. The building, which was begun on this 
spot in the time of Francois I,, was one of the earliest and 
one of the most exquisite of all the Renascence palaces of 
France; and, as completed under Henri IV., it had no 
superior in its own style in Northern Europe. 

The history of the gradual development of the original 
building over a period of more than three centuries from 
Francois I. to Louis Napoleon, its size being increased eight - 
or ten-fold without its first design and character being de- 
stroyed, is certainly one of the most interesting episodes in 
modern architecture; but it is too intricate and technical to 
be explained without plans and illustrations. The five cen- 
turies of Parisian history from the wild times of Etienne 
Marcel to the wilder days of the Commune and the con- 
flagration of May 1 87 1, centre round this typical building, 
and make the Place de Gr^ve as memorable a spot as any 
in Europe. As every one knows, within the last thirty years 
of the nineteenth century the Hotel de Ville has been entirely 
rebuilt, on an even grander scale, and with more elaborate 



402 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

ornamentation; but in design it is a complete reproduction 
of the building as it stood in 187 1, with certain modifications, 
and, as many believe, with decided improvements. 

Mr. P. G. Hamerton, in his most judicious and beautiful 
book, Paris in Old and Present Times, does not hesitate to 
call the H6tel de Ville in its first freshness of 1883, "the most 
perfectly beautiful of modern edifices"; "the fairest palace 
ever erected in the world." To many eyes, the mellowed 
tone of ten years is a gain, and that of a hundred years will 
perhaps prove a greater gain still. Many will be ready to 
agree that, as it stands completed, it is the most successful 
and interesting building that has been built in Europe in 
the nineteenth century. The exquisite material and work- 
manship, the refinement and delicacy of its parts, the in- 
genuity of its composition, its noble site and perfect appro- 
priateness, make it a source of constant delight to a cultivated 
observer. To count it as perfect or worthy to rank with 
the best buildings of a great age — even with such a palace 
as the original Louvre of Pierre Lescot, or Inigo Jones's 
original design for Whitehall — ^ is a very different thing. 

If we imagine the existing building without its vast wings, 
i.e. as it was in the time of Louis XIIL, it would be an edifice 
of singular grace and just proportion. But then it would 
be less than one-fifth of its present size, and in no sense a 
great palace at all. As it now stands, we cannot but notice 
that it is a vast superstructure, or annexe to an exquisite 
centre. And, since the huge annexed wings have two stories 
besides the roof, while the central block was but one story, 
the enormous wings designed in the present century overtop 
and overload the central block designed in the sixteenth 
century. The addition has been made with signal skill, 
but we cannot help seeing that the building is the result of 
two distinct ideas, and that a lovely original gem has been 



MUNICIPAL MUSEUMS OF PARIS 403 

converted into an imposing pile. But even so, how bright, 
graceful, and harmonious a mass does it appear, ghttering 
like marble in the summer sun, as if it had risen purified 
from all its sombre memories — the most artistic achieve- 
ment in stone of the nineteenth century. 

But I have no wish to venture on the field of art — a 
ground where one is apt to be assailed by the professors of 
plaster and brick — genus irritahile structorum — my present 
purpose is to say a word for the civic appropriateness of the 
H6tel de Ville. As Paris has not grown out westwards and 
northwards quite like London, but as the Cite is still its 
practical centre, the Hotel de Ville is perfectly well placed on 
the historic site it has held for five centuries and a half. 
No site in Paris, except that of the Louvre, is superior, and 
very few sites anywhere in Northern Europe are equal to 
it. But when we examine the building in detail, we notice 
that it forms an immense historical museum. It is covered 
with statues, names, and dates which recall every incident 
in the strange history of Paris. No one will say that the 
statues are all works of art, or that all the men commemo- 
rated are statesmen or heroes. But how completely it puts 
to shame the decorations of our London Guildhall, with the 
gingerbread portal of Dance, the tomfoolery of Gog and 
Magog, and the monument of Lord Mayor Beckford. The 
Hotel de Ville of Paris is at least a serious attempt to raise 
a historic monument to the memory of the actors in the fierce 
communal Hfe of Paris. Our Guildhall reeks of Jingoism 
and turtle soup. 

Within, this vast building, which houses, it is said, in its 
various offices four thousand officials, has been made a mu- 
seum of modern art. Those who care may retort that the 
art is melodramatic, which some of it undoubtedly is. But 
it is the best that France to-day can produce, and it may 



404 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

fairly be doubted if the rest of Europe could produce as 
good. Certainly some of the sculpture could not be equalled 
out of France, and several of the mural decorations in colour 
put to shame what has hitherto been attempted amongst us. 
Some hundred works in sculpture — groups, reliefs, statues, 
busts, caryatides, chimney-pieces — are by Barrias, Gau- 
therin, Mercie, Dalou, Guillaume, and Falgui^re. Of mural 
decorations in colour there will be ultimately more than 
two hundred distinct pieces by such painters as Puvis de 
Chavannes, J. Lefebvre, Cormon, Maignan, Dagnan- 
Bouveret, Laurens, Gervex, Cazin, B. Constant, Besnard, 
Rixens, Humbert, and Bonnat. The idea of the H6tel de 
Ville decorations apparently is to make the building a mu- 
seum of modem art, a civic Luxembourg gallery, the prize 
of the aspiring sculptor and painter. 

It is easier to point out the weaknesses of these works 
than to show how France, or even Europe in these fin de 
siecle days, is likely to get any better. There is no doubt a 
good deal of jobbery and favouritism in the selection of the 
artists, and not a little of vulgar reclame in their productions. 
But such is the curse under which Art existed in this closing 
decade of the century. In the meantime there are some 
interesting experiments in mural decoration. Puvis de 
Chavannes, Humbert, Lefebvre show interesting designs; 
and at least there is the merit of variety of methods in search 
of some higher type. It is now the fashion to execute these 
works, not in true fresco on plaster, but in a preparation of 
wax painted on canvas. By this means the pictures are 
movable and can be exhibited in the Salon before they are 
set in situ on the walls. The device has some advantages 
in that the picture can be preserved from destruction, and 
is not liable to the decay inevitable to plaster. But though 
it escapes the shiny surface of an oil painting, it never attains 



MUNICIPAL MUSEUMS OF PARIS 405 

the peaceful radiance of true fresco ; and the practice of Salon 
exhibition introduces a new horror and fresh extravagance 
even into the absurd art of ceiling painting. If Puvis de 
Chavannes has come nearer to mural decoration than his 
compeers in Europe, it may safely be affirmed that Bonnat 
in his "Triomphe de I'Art," designed for the ceiling of the 
Salon des Arts of the Hotel de Ville, and exhibited in the 
Champs Elysdes Salon, fulfils one's ideal of the Degradation 
of Art by extravagance, vulgarity, noise, and general inanity. 

Still, after counting all the failures and all the absurdities, 
one cannot deny that the H6tel de Ville shows a determined 
effort to place the civic government of Paris in one of the 
noblest palaces of modern times, which shall be at once a 
municipal Heroon, or monument of civic patriotism, and a 
museum of modern art, in all its forms, plastic and graphic. 
The purpose, the effort is right; the execution, if faulty, 
takes its faults from the age. It has not been done as it 
was done at Athens, or Venice, or Florence ; but it has been 
done far more worthily than it has been done elsewhere in 
modern Europe. And if we take the Hotel de Ville as a 
whole, inside and outside, its architecture and its decorations, 
its sculptures, paintings, fittings, and ornaments, it must be 
said — not only to put to shame Dance's dismal Mansion 
House and the make-shift offices where the County Council 
governs London — but even to hold its own at least on equal 
terms with that on which England has lavished such vast 
sums and such infinite labour (alas ! how often in vain !) — 
the Houses of Parliament at Westminster. 

It seems quite natural to Englishmen to have their national 
Parliament in the most sumptuous palace their artists can 
raise, and to fill it with works of decorative art from pinnacle 
to pavement. A healthy instinct tells them that such lav- 
ishness stimulates patriotism, and makes government more 



4o6 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

effective by embodying the seat of authority with impressive 
symbols. Whatever our party poHtics and our economic 
creed, all thinking men amongst us are satisfied within reason- 
able limits to accept such public magnificence, however much 
we grumble at the form which it takes. In Paris this public 
magnificence is the special delight of civic patriotism. And, 
when we have a civic patriotism in London, it will need some 
similar expression. Londoners are fast learning this lesson 
of municipal patriotism ; and they cannot too early study the 
example in this matter of the city of Paris, which places its 
urban government in a building that reflects and concentrates 
the beauty of their beautiful city, and forms at once a museum 
of art and an historic monument. 

The Municipal Council of Paris, which has its seat in the 
H6tel de Ville, is charged with education as well as care of 
the streets, and as such has charge of many subordinate 
institutions, and has sundry affiliated departments. One 
of the most characteristic of these is the Museum and Li- 
brary, now seated in the Hotel Carnavalet, in the Marais 
quarter near the Place des Vosges (old Place Royal). This 
is now devoted to a museum of monuments, pictures, sculp- 
tures, and other works relating to the history of Paris in all 
ages. It begins with the Stone Age in the basin of the Seine, 
and goes down to the present day. Everything of pre- 
historic, Gallic, Gallo-Roman, Roman, Gothic, Renascence, 
Revolutionary, and Modern art found in Paris, and illus- 
trating the history of the city, is here collected. It contains 
a collection of pictures of Paris at various ages, maps, plans, 
models, and other works, showing the aspect of the city at 
various ages from the sixteenth century to the present day. 
By these it is easy to get an exact conception of Paris from 
the time when it was a fortified feudal city, and of its gradual 
development to the city we see to-day. These pictures are 



MUNICIPAL MUSEUMS OF PARIS 407 

in great measure the sources from which M. Hoffbauer made 
his ingenious pictures for his great work, Paris a travers les 
Ages. His large oil picture — "Paris under Henri III., in 
1588" — as seen from the tower of the Louvre, is singularly 
instructive. One is glad to hear that M. Hoffbauer's original 
drawings have been procured by the Museum, and are about 
to be specially exhibited. It is seldom safe to trust in an 
imaginary "restoration." But Hoffbauer is a learned anti- 
quarian as well as an artist, an engineer, an architect, and an 
accomplished historian. His views of old Paris will not only 
bear very close study, but are singularly vivid presentations 
of the ancient city in all its phases. 

The Hotel Carnavalet is, after the Louvre and the Cluny 
museums, the most interesting and pleasant of the public 
galleries. The accident that it is situated far from the 
quarters of fashion, tourists, and students, and also that it is 
a recent acquisition of the city, has made it so little frequented 
that, to all but a small fraction of visitors, its very existence 
is unknown. Yet no more delightful relic of old France 
survives in the busy quarter which was the "quartier St. 
Germain" of the Francois and the Henris in the sixteenth 
century. The chateau itself is a link between the Renas- 
cence of the age of Pierre Lescot and the literary society of the 
Grand Monarque; so that both the objects exhibited in the 
Museum, and the books and engravings of the Library, gain 
a special savour of their own from being housed in a rare 
historic palace. 

The Hdtel was built for Jacques des Ligneris, President 
of the "Parlement," by Pierre Lescot and Bullant, in 1550, 
and the facade was adorned with some large and beautiful 
reliefs by Jean Goujon. In 1578 it was sold to Franfoise 
de la Beaune, wife of Francois de Kernevenoy, or Kernevalec, 
a Breton, who had been governor of Henri III. From them 



4o8 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

it has retained the name of Carnavalet, taken to be a euphoni- 
ous corruption. The only part of the original building is the 
central block facing the entrance, and the ground floor of the 
three sides of the court, including the portal of entrance from 
the street. Ducerceau continued the work of Pierre Lescot ; 
and Mansard, in 1660, transformed it by adding the eastern 
facade on the street, and raising a new story on the original 
ground floor of the three sides. The work of the seventeenth 
century is greatly inferior to that of the sixteenth; but it 
has in no way destroyed its peculiar grace. Madame de 
Sevigne leased and inhabited the Hotel from 1677 till her 
death in 1696. The rooms used by her and her daughter, 
Madame de Grignan, the hardly worthy recipient of the 
famous letters, are now devoted to the Library and the 
collection of prints. They retain their original form, decora- 
tion, and panelling. Here the student, by the courtesy of 
the director and the librarian, may pass delightful days of 
study, surrounded by portraits and mementoes of the time, 
and can almost cease to believe that two hundred years 
have passed since the greatest of letter-writers used to sit in 
the same room with the same ornaments, labouring at her 
daily task of love, or receiving the brilliant literary society 
of her age. 

It is indeed a singular combination of good fortune and 
good taste that has placed the municipal museum and library 
of Paris in a building which is itself a most instructive school 
of architecture, a fascinating relic of the ancient city, and the 
historic seat of one of the chief intellectual movements of 
the great age of Louis XIV. It would not be possible to find 
for London so appropriate and interesting a building, even 
if the materials of such a municipal museum and library were 
already at hand. Something of the kind might have been 
done, if the Metropolitan Board of Works, when it acquired 



MUNICIPAL MUSEUMS OF PARIS 409 

old Northumberland House, had converted it into an his- 
torical Museum and Library of London antiquities, and had 
placed therein such objects and work of art and literature 
as may now be seen in the Guildhall, South Kensington, and 
in sundry other collections and libraries. But then London 
would have had to forgo its Grand Hotel and the Avenue 
Theatre. 

The collections in the Museum show us types of civilisa- 
tion from the age of the lake-dwellers, who founded some 
pile fastnesses in the broads of the Seine, down to our own 
times; and they serve to bring out first, that Paris was an 
earlier and much more important Roman town than ever 
was London, and next, that the city of Paris had no such 
break in its history as befell London after the departure of 
the Romans, and the decay of the Briton population until 
its resettlement by the Saxons. 

From the age of the Roman conquest down to the Renas- 
cence there is a series of objects — tombs, sarcophagi, 
statuettes, reliefs, pottery, inscriptions, glass, bronzes, medals, 
coins, with fragments of carvings, doorways, finials, and 
statues from mediaeval churches and buildings. From the 
middle of the sixteenth century until our own times there is 
a complete collection of paintings, drawings, sketches, plans, 
and engravings showing every chief building and every aspect 
of the city at successive epochs. " The Cemetery of the Inno- 
cents in the sixteenth century" (now the delicious square 
of the Fountain); the ''Procession of the League in 1590"; 
the "Carrousel in the Place Roy ale in 1 612"; the series of 
views by the two Raguenets, those of Callot, Chastillon, 
Demachy, and La Fontaine, and the engravings of Ducer- 
ceau, Israel Sylvestre, Callot, Perelle, and Meryon, are of 
great interest to the historian, the archaeologist, and even 
to the curious traveller. 



4IO REALITIES AND IDEALS 

The paintings, it is true, are not, like the engravings 
and etchings, of any artistic merit; but from their general 
precision and great number and variety, they form ample 
material wherewith to trace the gradual transformation of 
the Paris of Louis XI. — the gloomy, picturesque, squalid, 
romantic, feudal city, with its enormous wealth of noble 
pointed architecture and grand castellated fortresses — into 
the open, airy, symmetrical, Hausmannised city of boulevards 
and gardens, palaces and hotels, so delightful to the man of 
the world and so interesting to the man of culture. The 
history of this transformation, a process steadily continued 
for about three centuries and a half, is one of the most definite 
and suggestive episodes in modern history, and almost the 
central school wherein to study the development of the art of 
living and the art of building that Northern Europe affords. 
The city of Chicago to-day is not an inexplicable fact — given 
enormous wealth, energy, and ambition. But the formation 
of a far more splendid Chicago on the Seine, on the lines 
and foundations and over the very structures of the Paris 
such as it is described by Victor Hugo in his Notre Dame, 
is one of the most complex and instructive chapters in the 
history of European civilisation. 

As is natural, the strongest feature of the Carnavalet Mu- 
seum is the collection of works of art, documents, and relics 
that illustrate the Revolution. This has been largely in- 
creased by the gift of the great collection of M. Alfred de 
Liesville, in 1881. There is hardly a single person named 
in the political movement from Marie Antoinette, Mirabeau, 
and Robespierre, down to Louis Blanc and Jules Michelet, 
of whom some likeness may not be found in the thousand 
pictures, engravings, busts, medals, and drawings in this 
collection. Nor would it be easy to find a single incident 
in the long struggles of 1 789-1802, 1830, 1848, which is 



MUNICIPAL MUSEUMS OF PARIS 41I 

not here represented or illustrated by mementoes. For the 
student of the Revolution the most diligent reading of all 
the authorities from Buchez et Roux or Berville et Barriere 
down to Von Sybel and Mortimer Ternaux, will find that 
he has failed to gain a vivid conception of the men and epi- 
sodes of the time, till he has mastered the contents of the 
museum and library, with its portraits, drawings, documents, 
models, porcelains, relics, and various works of technical art. 
There is a rough but literal and contemporary sketch of the 
"F^te de la Federation," or Gathering of the Federal Dele- 
gates at the Champ de Mars in 1790, which carefully studied 
may do much to correct the clumsy caricature that Carlyle 
has given us of a really singular event. However alien to 
English habits and tastes, it must have been a sight of ex- 
traordinary power to impress those present ; and it certainly 
produced a profound reaction on the provinces of France. 

The Library, which now has more than eighty thousand 
volumes and seventy thousand prints, is an integral part of 
the Museum; but the collections have increased so much of 
late that it is contemplated to remove to another building the 
Library which now occupies the apartments of Madame de 
Sdvigne. The contents of the Library relate to the history 
of Paris ; and it is a great boon to those who are studying it 
to have in one set of apartments and with the facility of im- 
mediate reference every book, pamphlet, or illustration which 
relates to the subject, and to find at hand at a moment's 
notice fine impressions of the magnificent works of Ducer- 
ceau, Chastillon, Sylvestre, Rigaud, Perelle, Viollet-le-Duc, 
Guilhermy, and Hoffbauer, the etchings of Meryon and 
Martial, and every known authority that can throw light on the 
history of the city. The Library is open daily to all comers ; 
and the excellent librarian, with his courteous assistant, is 
ever ready to make the reader's task easy and pleasant. 



412 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

The history of Paris has been more fully and elaborately 
written than perhaps that of any other city in the world, 
unless it be Rome. The histories begin with Jean de Jandan 
in 1323, and the latest is that of Hoffbauer, Fournier, and 
others — "Paris a tr avers les Ages — Aspects successifs 
des monuments et quartiers historiques de Paris depuis le 
XIII siecle jusqu'a nos jours. Par M. F. Hoffbauer, archi- 
tecte. Texte par Ed. Fournier, Paul Lacroix, A. de Mon- 
taiglon, A. Bonnardot, Jules Cousin, etc. etc. etc., Paris. 
Firmin Didot, 1872-1882. 2 vols, folio." There is also a 
special historical society for Paris, the Societe de I'histoire 
de Paris, founded in August 1874, which publishes annual 
volumes of research, and forms a centre for the pursuit of 
the archaeology of the city. 

But the most important work is the great collection insti- 
tuted by the Conseil Municipal in 1866, of which in 1894 
more than thirty quarto volumes had been issued, many of 
them splendidly illustrated. This noble work contains the 
text, edited and annotated, of all the early histories of Paris 
from the fourteenth century, facsimiles from manuscripts 
and illuminations, plans and drawings, and a great body of 
researches on all the aspects of the city life and industry. A 
work of this kind can hardly be undertaken by private 
adventure. It is eminently a duty of some public authority. 
When I had the honour of serving on the London County 
Council, I desired to induce the Council to undertake a simi- 
lar work for London ; but, owing to the absurd limits which 
the Act has placed on the Council's expenditure, they had 
no power to devote a shilling to promote such a scheme. 
The Corporation of the City can and do undertake something 
of the kind. But the Corporation unfortunately do not 
represent London and cannot act for London. 

It has often been suggested that the Municipal Govern- 



MUNICIPAL MUSEUMS OF PARIS 413 

ment of London would do well to send over a small com- 
mission of experts to study the administrative system and 
municipal institutions of certain great towns in France and 
Germany, especially those of Paris and Berlin. Amongst 
the most striking lessons they would bring back would be a 
thorough examination and report on the Hotel de Ville of 
Paris, its history and organisation, and the historical museums 
and libraries connected with it. It cannot be many years 
now before public opinion will insist on the united and 
reconstituted City of London having a Hall and Palace 
worthy of its vast resources and gigantic tasks. And among 
the various undertakings which the new Council of the Old 
City will have to take in hand are an adequate Museum of 
London antiquities, a Library of London illustrations, and a 
comprehensive history of London in all its phases, and in 
all sides of its long and memorable annals. 



XVIII 

PARIS IN 1851 AND IN 1907 

{From " The Nineteenth Century,^ 1907) 

My first knowledge of Paris was in the summer of 185 1, in 
the days of the Second Repubhc, and during a visit to that 
city in May and June 1907 I was again struck by all the 
changes and contrasts in the aspect of things that fifty-six 
eventful years had brought about. It happened that on 
my way to Switzerland I was detained in Paris; and, as I 
was myself in practical quarantine and debarred from the 
society of my friends, I had to occupy my leisure in strolling 
about the streets, meditating on the enormous developments 
and ravages of half a century, giving a new study to all the 
museums, galleries, public institutions, and other "sights" 
which I fondly supposed I had exhausted twenty or thirty 
years ago. For some weeks I was just the "man in the 
street," the tourist freshly arrived in the "Ville Lumiere" — 
"doing its shows" as if for the first time, a travelling Rip 
Van Winkle wondering at the new world upon which he had 
alighted. 

I call it a "new world" because, although I first knew 
Paris in 185 1, have visited it almost every year since, have 
lived in French families, made constant studies in its mu- 
seums, and indeed twenty-one years ago had "personally 
conducted" a large party from Newton Hall who spent a 
week there in June 1886, I had never quite realised the vast 
changes, additions, and improvements which twenty or 

414 



PARIS IN 185 1 AND IN I907 415 

thirty years have brought. Men long past middle life are 
loth to make a fresh study of a city they believe they know 
thoroughly; and at that age anything like "sight-seeing" 
is apt to be looked on as a folly and a nuisance. An irksome 
chance compelled me to undergo that corvee once more. 
And I can assure my contemporaries that unless they will 
keep up to date their knowledge of the topography, idiosyn- 
crasies, and art treasures of Paris they will miss a great deal 
which is well worth knowing as well as seeing. 

I had been often in France and had lived in French pro- 
vincial families in the later years of Louis Philippe, so that 
when I came to Paris in 185 1 I was quite at home with the 
people, the country, and the language. Looking back over 
the fifty-seven years since then, one is amazed by the enor- 
mous work of destruction and reconstruction which the third 
emperor completed, or left as a ruinous legacy to the Third 
Republic to complete. In half a century the Haussmannisa- 
tion de Paris has made a spectacle of transformation greater 
perhaps than that of any city on this side of the Atlantic. 
Paris in 1851, at least within the inner boulevards, was 
substantially what Napoleon the First had made it or had 
designed to make it. The old boulevards looked to be what 
they were — the sites of the demolished ramparts of the city 
and fosse — shady with trees and broken into different archi- 
tectural forms. None of the newer boulevards had been 
thought of — Strasbourg, Sebastopol, St. Michel, Hauss- 
mann, Magenta, Raspail, Malesherbes, Mont-Parnasse. I 
have seen them all in the making, and so too the Avenue de 
1' Opera, de Breteuil, Kleber, Victor Hugo, and scores of 
others, with at least one hundred great streets cutting through 
the tortuous old city as if by volleys of cannon balls. 

Strolling about the city the other day I tried to conjure 
up again a vision of the city as I saw it in 185 1 — within the 



41 6 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

old boulevards a network of narrow, winding streets such as 
we see still round the Rue du Temple on one side of the river 
or about the Rue de Seine on the other; the Rue de Rivoli 
not yet rebuilt beyond the Louvre; the old historic houses 
once inhabited by men famous in history, literature, and art ; 
the quiet corners with traces of feudal castles, splendid monas- 
teries, and Gothic churches, grey and crumbling with en- 
crusted saints and angels. I remember Notre Dame still 
buried amid old buildings, and its magnificent facade in its 
antique carving yet unpolluted by the sacrilegious hand of 
the restorer. The Cit6 on the island was still what it had 
been for five or six centuries, a maze of old tenements and 
labyrinthine streets. And the inner bulk of the city looked 
as it had looked all through the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries down to the Revolution. How little of this remains 
to-day ! Old mansions, historic churches, picturesque streets, 
and sleepy impasses are all gone. Broad geometric avenues, 
roaring with huge motor and tram cars, have torn their path 
through them and swept the old remnants into oblivion. 

Was this marvellous change a gain or a disaster ? Thou- 
sands of rare specimens of mediaeval work, scenes of many 
centuries of stirring events, street vistas, towers, and gables, 
dear to generations of etchers — all have gone and left not 
a wrack behind. A huge transformation of old Paris was 
inevitable if Paris was to remain the heart of modern France. 
In 1857 the population was about one million; with the new 
suburbs, it is now almost three millions. This vast number 
could not be permanently cribbed and cabined in its old 
mediaeval labyrinth. New lines of transit had to be made. 
We may accept the new outer boulevards, the avenues, and 
broad streets outside the enceinte of the eighteenth century. 
But nothing will reconcile me to the wanton destruction caused 
by the Boulevard St. Germain, the annihilation of the island 



PARIS IN 1851 AND IN I907 417 

Cite, and the pompous extravagance of the Avenue de I'Op^ra. 
The Opera and its Avenue were one of the worst offences 
of the Empire — a monument of tasteless and insolent luxury. 
And the unfinished Boulevard Raspail is one of the evil 
examples of the mania for reconstruction and waste without 
real overriding necessity. 

It is notorious that under the Empire the reconstruction of 
Paris was to a great extent a political and social device, and 
even more a corrupt speculation, a financial gamble. Paris, 
no doubt, had to be entirely revised. But it ought to have 
been done with one-third less of cost and half the destruc- 
tion. In the result the municipal taxation has run up to 
the terrible amount of something like £4: los. per head. 
Underground railways, tram-roads, motor omnibus, motor- 
cycles, automobiles, and every mode of conveyance do not 
suffice to supply the ever-increasing traffic, while they have 
made Paris the most difficult and dangerous of cities to the 
unwary man on foot. As these vast Noah's arks roar and 
thunder down steep and narrow streets, as a thousand motors 
tear about the broad Avenues and Places, as taximetres and 
cycles race round corners without warning, one needs a pair 
of eyes at the back of one's head and an eye over each ear 
as well as under the brow. But when all is said, it cannot 
be denied that the brilliant aspect of modern Paris is a peren- 
nial source of its wealth. And, though I see little beauty in 
the Opera or the Grand Palais, I am bound to confess that 
the scene from the Hotel de Ville to the Arc de I'Etoile offers 
far the most resplendent prospect that any city has ever pro- 
duced since the Rome of the Antonines. 

The point to which I seek to draw attention is the immense 
additions to the National Museums of Paris made in recent 
years, and the opening of a number of newly acquired collec- 
tions, many of them even since the Great Exhibition of 1900. 



4l8 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Within a generation, to a great extent within the present 
century, the pubhc museums have been so greatly recon- 
structed and enlarged, and so many new museums have been 
acquired, that the judicious lover of art may find much of his 
work to do over again. The Louvre itself has been entirely 
rearranged and enlarged, and has received by bequest and 
purchase a series of splendid acquisitions which amount to a 
new museum. The Greek antiquities from Delphi are now 
shown together in excellent reproductions which make one 
envy a Government that can spare the necessary funds for 
excavations of surpassing interest. Why is England the 
only nation which is deaf to such appeals? 

The Louvre has, I think, grown in a generation faster than 
our own National Gallery and British Museum. The addi- 
tions to the Greek and the Asiatic collections are of great 
extent and importance. The new galleries named after 
Thiers, Thomy-Thiery, Morgan, Rothschild, are all inter- 
esting and varied. The additions in the ground floor to the 
Mediaeval and Renascence antiquities, the new Delia Robbia 
Hall on the side of the Seine, the new Carpeaux Hall on the 
Rue de Rivoli side, would occupy a busy day to study; and 
fresh works come in each season by bequest, purchase, gift, 
or loan. The new specimens of early Itahan fresco, panel, 
and canvas in the Salle des Primitifs, the reframing and 
rearranging of the magnificent Rubens and Van Dycks in 
the special Galeries Van Dyck and Rubens are things which 
no traveller should fail to know, but which the tens of thou- 
sands who knew their Louvre ten or twenty years ago have 
never seen. The whole of the rearrangement of the picture 
galleries into French, Itahan, Dutch, and EngHsh Halls, 
with the cabinets round the Rubens Gallery, are an im- 
mense improvement on the unscientific hanging which de- 
lighted the tourist, or worried the student, a generation a^^o. 



PARIS IN 185 1 AND IN I907 419 

The Museum of the Louvre, uniting in one our National 
Gallery, British Museum, and South Kensington, is so vast 
— we are told that it occupies some two hours merely to 
walk through the galleries without stopping — that many an 
ordinary tourist sees little more than half. And those who 
have not visited it carefully since 1900 have much to learn. 
The Adolphe Rothschild bequest is a study in itself. And 
few but experts, one fears, climb the stairs of the second story 
and see the collection of the French modern schools — the 
Corots, Millets, Daubignys, Diaz, Decamps, and Rousseaus, 
and the bequest of Thomy-Thiery in a gallery bearing his 
name (1902). It would be well worth any young painter's 
while to go to Paris simply to see these. If he would go from 
them to the Salon of the day, he would learn a lesson in the 
art of modern Decadence. 

The Pavilion de Marsan — the North-Western angle of 
the Louvre, and the only part of it built under the Third 
Republic — now holds the Museum of Decorative Art; and 
at present it forms a distinct collection in the hands of a 
society, destined ultimately to pass to the State. Its paint- 
ings, sculptures, wood and ivory carvings, tapestry, enamels, 
medals, jewels, porcelain, engravings, and lace are too often 
overlooked in the multiplication of art museums which Paris 
now presents to the tourist. Over and above the old State 
collections which every traveller believes that he knows, there 
are now added the wonderful Chinese and Japanese bronzes 
which M. Cernuschi bequeathed in 1895 to the City of Paris; 
the tapestries of the Musee Galliera; the Chinese and Japan- 
ese porcelains of the Musee Guimet; the house and designs 
of Gustave Moreau (1898) ; and the Musee Victor Hugo in 
the Place des Vosges (1903), containing a remarkable store 
of works of art which testify how deeply the poet impressed 
his thought on the imagination of the nineteenth century. 



420 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Every tourist knows the Petit Palais, the Luxembourg 
gallery of modern art, the Cluny, and the beautiful Carna- 
valet Hotel, the abode of Madame de Sevigne, with its im- 
mense collections of historic records of the City of Paris, 
its local and personal reminiscences. But few ordinary 
travellers realise the rate at which all of these are acquiring 
new works by bequest or purchase. Every time I visit them 
again I am struck by the growth. The Petit Palais (1902) 
is the property of the city, and is rapidly filling with modern 
paintings and sculptures. The Cluny and the Carnavalet 
have largely benefited by recent gifts, by the Rothschild 
family as well as from smaller collections. The Pantheon 
now has its wall decorations practically complete. Those of 
Puvis de Chavannes are admirable examples of true decora- 
tive art adapted to a classical building both in form and tone. 
Most of the others are noisy Academy pictures, theatrical in 
composition and strangely out of keeping with the building 
in which they stand. Nothing is worse than to thrust mod- 
ern paintings on a cold semi-Roman fane. The Pantheon is 
not yet a success. 

Over and above the permanent museums, Paris has a set 
of temporary exhibitions in the season which I found an 
endless source of interest and study. The two great Salons 
in the Grand Palais with many thousands of pictures, statues, 
drawings, engravings, and gems — the portraits and manu- 
scripts in the Bibliothbque Nationale, the rearranged docu- 
ments in the Archives Nationales, in the grandiose Hotel de 
Soubise, the portraits of modern women in the delicious 
Chateau de Bagatelle, just acquired by the City of Paris 
(1904). As one viewed the portraits of the beauties and 
grandes dames of the last Empire one could see here and there 
an aged but distinguished lady surrounded by her grand- 
children, looking at herself as she had appeared in the fashions 



PARIS IN 185 1 AND IN I907 421 

of forty and fifty years ago. She no doubt admitted that 
fashion has improved. The acquisition of this graceful httle 
Chateau and its sweet English park in the Bois du Boulogne 
has been one of the best prizes of the Conseil Municipal. 

When one passes from the permanent collections of former 
days to the huge collections of contemporary art, the soul 
sinks within one at the spectacle of universal degeneration. 
Painting, sculpture, porcelain, jewelry, all forms of decorative 
art testify to the same decline. And it is a decline stamped 
with one vicious craze which has poisoned genius and skill of 
hand. That craze is the passion to do something wew; some- 
thing which may attract attention; startle, even if it disgust 
the public. The curse on modern life — the thirst for the 
new, the rage to get out of the old skin — is the blight on 
our literature, our art, our drama, our manners — even our 
morals. It is a passion without aim, or conviction, or feel- 
ing — a mere restless itch to get free from old habits and to 
get into something uncommon, it hardly matters what, if 
only it can announce itself as "unconventional." It is not 
to be beautiful — indeed the beautiful in any form is "con- 
ventional" — rather it must be ugly, so long as the ugliness 
is unusual. It may be gross, absurd, horrible, obscene, 
tawdry, childish, so long as the older generations would have 
turned from it with anger or pain. If so, it is Part nouveau. 

One who remembers what French art was and has seen 
the Salons of the last fifty years must note a gradual descent. 
Not to speak of the painters and sculptors before the Third 
Empire, when one passes from the later French artists in 
the Louvre and the Luxembourg to the two Salons, what 
a contrast! What a fall! What a pot-pourri! Compare 
these contorted nudities, these bleeding ruffians, these acres 
of pantomime tableaux, with Ingres, Delacroix, Gerome, 
Cabanel, Corot, Daubigny, Meissonier, Troyon, Millet, 



422 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Pradier, Barye, Carpeaux — what a fall it is ! No man 
of sense, of course, denies that there are still in France men 
who paint portraits full of life and colour, landscapes of 
truth, and now and then even of charm, men who can model 
the human figure with complete mastery, and almost every- 
thing except grace. There is no lack of skill of hand, in- 
dustry, ambition, even a kind of perverse originality, in this 
cosmopolitan crowd of men and women who shout to us 
from four thousand canvases and pedestals to look and see 
how clever they are. 

We do not care to see how clever they are. We do not 
desire to see things which no painter ever yet ventured to 
paint, and no sculptor ever thought of modelling, and no 
public ever yet submitted to be shown. We want to have 
things beautiful to look on, things which recall to us ex- 
quisite visions of all that is fair, pure, harmonious on this 
earth. And they ply us with scenes which are meant to be 
repulsive, which aim at being ugly, foul, or grotesque. Their 
baigneuses and odalisques twist their naked bodies into shapes 
which are meant to combine nastiness with queerness. 
Horses are painted of ultramarine hue; seas are coloured 
vermilion; girls have lampblack on their cheeks. The 
painter says : " Take my word for it — I saw it so — we have 
no conventions now." There is one convention indeed, 
so ancient, so necessary, so universal, that its deliberate 
defiance to-day may arouse the bile of the least squeamish 
of men and should make women withdraw at once.^ 

There is no lack of pains, no want of cleverness, smart 
"brushwork" by the yard, and original ideas of the grosser 

* But I must veil my protest, as Gibbon says, in the obscurity of a 
learned tongue : Tam in pictura quam in sculptura, secundum con- 
suetudinem illam de veteribus traditam, mos erat ne omnia muliebria 
veris formis nee veris coloribus monstrarent, sicut in natura videri possent. 
E contrario, pictores hodierni omnes corporis feminei partes nuda veritate 
depingere gaudent. 



PARIS IN 185 1 AND IN I907 423 

type — the "model" standing, or sprawling, at ease and 
smoking a short pipe, a surgeon probing a patient's sore, 
the unmentionables of the dissecting room, of the rowdy 
studio, of the Bouge-des-rats — plenty of all this, provided 
it be at once novel and coarse. There are no doubt fine 
pictures, powerful heads, and pleasant paysages here and 
there on the interminable walls of canvas. But the impres- 
sion left is that only one picture in a hundred seriously aims 
at giving us any sense of beauty, of delight in some un- 
noticed side of nature, harmonious blending of form and 
colour. The direct aim of ninety-nine pictures is to make 
us stop to look — if possible to give us a shock — epater le 
bourgeois — to amuse the vicious, to brutalise the innocent. 

There are still great portrait painters in France ; but what 
mere tradesmen's advertisements are most of the portraits 
on these walls. Vulgarity, pose, money, and swagger reign 
supreme. One would think that the modistes of the Rue de 
la Paix pay for these portraits of Madame X., to show what 
elegant "creations" their customers wear, what novelties 
in patterns and materials are now on view. The face of 
Madame X. seems a mere dummy, a clothes-horse, which 
the painter threw in gratis while he lavished his skill on 
robes, manteaux, laces, and jewels of which the shops hired 
him to make a sort of coloured fashion-plate. It is difficult 
to imagine real ladies masquerading as mere lady-assistants 
in a smart show-room. 

And the men — what gross, gluttonous, insolent "gold- 
bugs " they look ! Their heavy lips seem to smack of cham- 
pagne and pdtes defoie gras; in their obese trunks one seems 
to hear the bullion ring; nine out of ten are painted with 
tobacco between their teeth. Realistic no doubt, but let 
us imagine Bellini's "Doge of Venice," or Van Dyck's "Ge- 
vartius" with cigarettes as the typical motif. Advancing 



424 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

"realism" will one day perhaps paint its great men in the 
act of taking solace in some other natural function of the 
body. But in our age of apolaustic abandon tobacco is 
thought to give the guinea-stamp of manly dignity and noble 
bearing. 

Sculpture has been the central French art ever since the 
days of Jean Goujon, Puget, and Houdon — nay, ever since 
the carved portals of Reims, Chartres, and Amiens. But 
now, alas ! even sculpture is failing her. There is any 
amount of cleverness, knowledge, up-to-dateness. But the 
morbid love of the new, the real, the ugly has perverted it 
to base uses. A hideous old woman in a tattered skirt, 
with pendent dugs and knotty claws, may be quite natural 
and real, but is not a subject for art in a life-size statue. 
Nothing can make a coal-heaver's broadbrim hat and cordu- 
roy trousers sculpturesque. And a modern gentleman in 
a silk hat and frock coat looks foolish in a group surrounded 
by naked Graces and classical Virtues. There is cleverness 
still in the sculpture of to-day, but as high Art it is in de- 
cadence. 

Let me fortify my indictment by the authority of one of 
the greatest of living sculptors. Dr. Rodin himself has just 
told us that all Art is in decadence. M. Rodin is a man of 
genius, of great gifts, and daring imagination. But I make 
bold to say that Rodin himself is a typical example of this 
decadence, and has done as much to teach and promote 
decadence as any man living. His extraordinary powers 
and his originality have made him the high priest and apostle 
of decadence. In his desire to attain to something new in 
his art, he has desperately plunged into the negation of art. 
In his passion to avoid " conventions" he has revelled in sheer 
awkwardness and brutality. And yearning to get rid of 
prettiness, smoothness, and "finish," he invented that absurd 



PARIS IN 1851 AND IN igo'J 425 

fad — sketchiness, haziness, confusedness in the plastic 
art. It is mere mimicry of Michel Angelo's unfinished 
figures. 

Now the raison cfttre of the plastic arts is definiteness, 
fixity, clearness, beauty and precision of form. We want 
to see exact shapes, solid beings, not to have suggested to 
us imaginary spirits or ghosts of men. A hazy statue is no 
more possible than a prosy poem, a vague demonstration, 
or mystical geometry. It is bad enough when some young 
coxcomb paints as if on a wax ground and then melts it till 
his colours have mixed and his lines are blurred. A mystical 
poem is conceivably true art. But a blurred statue is an 
outrage on good sense. And for a statue to repel us by its 
ugly form and to disgust us by its brutal idea is indeed the 
bathos of art. 

I take the famous "Penseur" which has now been set up 
in front of the portico of the Panth6on. What has this 
brawny ruffian to do with Thought, with Heroes, with any- 
thing or any one commemorated in the Temple of Genevieve 
and of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo? The idea 
seems suggested by the brutal boxer in the new National 
Museum at Rome. If this huge naked bruiser is thinking 
at all, he is trying to understand in his thick skull why the 
other man had pounded him, or how he could contrive to 
pound the other man. Nothing that can be called rational 
thought, or noble aspiration, ever entered this beefy bulk 
or crossed these sullen vulgar features. The "thinker" 
is nothing but a corpulent athlete, crumpling himself up in 
an ungainly attitude. We were always told to walk round 
a fine statue and we should find it noble, beautiful, natural, 
from every point of view. I walked round and round the 
"Penseur," and found him awkward, ugly, and queer, in 
every aspect. Yet this figure is now hailed as one of the 



426 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

triumphs of modern Art. Why? Mainly because it is 
new — something which ancient art would never tolerate ; 
because it is repulsive; because it is grotesque in its incon- 
gruity and its irrationality. Yes ! but it is " a new departure" 
— it scandalises the old-fashioned world, and creates " a 
sensation." Ah! that is decadence indeed, whatever be its 
power and its life. 

Well, there is one art which still flourishes in France; it 
has never been so brilliant, so popular, nay so dominant. 
Painting, sculpture, architecture, jewelry, may all be vul- 
garised by the love of sensation and the ostentation of wealth ; 
but one art is still supreme. Caricature never was so much 
alive, so much sought, so well paid. Go and see the Ex- 
hibition of the Humorists in the Palais de Glace if you desire 
to enjoy a living art. It is crowded all day with the rank, 
beauty, and fashion of Paris. Go and see its diabolically 
clever caricatures of notable persons from Edward the Seventh 
to a music-hall singer, its ingenious placards to boom soap, 
wine, corsets, cigarettes, hair dyes, and dog biscuits. There 
shines the true artist in his glory. There you will be able to 
penetrate to the mysteries of the life-school, the whims of the 
Quartier Latin, the buffooneries of the cabaret, the orgies 
of the cocottes — in fact, the seamy side of Paris-Boh^me. 
And these dainty sketches are crowded all day long with 
smart mondaines and American "buds." The immortal 
art of caricature is in its zenith. A few fogies and tourists go 
to the Salon; but Tout-Paris gives itself the rendezvous at 
the Humorists. 

France, like the rest of Europe, is being rapidly Ameri- 
canised — with Yankee "notions," syndicates, telephones, 
and, above all, advertisements. The world is being turned 
into one big advertising hoarding ; and life is a round of trades- 
men's "drummers." The best paid artists are the men who 



PARIS IN 1 85 1 AND IN 1907 427 

draw picture-posters. The meadows beside the railways 
are fragrant with the merits of a new chocolate, lung tonic, 
or Dunlop tyres. Half the press consists of open or con- 
cealed trade puffs. A short story hides a cryptic recom- 
mendation for a new cure for cancer; and a speech by the 
Prime Minister is broken off by a picture of a bathy-colpic 
corset or an office clerk suffering from backache. 

Literature itself, like Art, Drama, Dress, Trade — even 
Pleasure and Vice — has drawn new life from the Columbian 
science of puffery. Literature, being in low water, has 
invented a device to restore its lost reputation and its gains. 
The puffers' arts have reduced the reprints of the standard 
authors to a matter of centimes. To meet this the living 
authors are organising a movement to resist the concurrence 
des Morts. They call on the legislature to put a tax of lo 
per cent on deceased writers in order to suppress this unfair 
competition of the dead, to protect contemporary in- 
dustry, to pay them the proceeds of the tax derived from 
the perverse habit of reading Voltaire and Victor Hugo 
instead of Gyp and Jules Lemaltre. That is a lesson in 
Tariff Reform. 

Being out of humour with painting and sculpture — 
partly perhaps from being in quarantine myself — I con- 
soled myself with music and drama. By good luck I came 
in for the Tercentenary Night of Corneille at the Frangais, 
the Beethoven Commemoration at the Opera, and a noble 
performance of Gluck's Alceste at the Trocadero. Mounet 
Sully's Polyeucte is as fine as ever, and some good judges 
believe the play to be the masterpiece of Corneille. Those 
persons who have never read Corneille since they were at 
school and rarely see his tragedies at the Franjais have little 
idea how magnificent they are on the stage, how real and 
great are the possibilities of the classical drama. Shake- 



428 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

speare by all means ; but in strict tragedy the verdict of the 
ages, of the majority of the human race, is for the Attic 
rather than the Elizabethan type. 

I heard the masterpieces of Beethoven and Gluck, and 
Wagner's Valkyrie sung at the Opera by the same singers 
within the same week. And there again what is now called 
"old-fashioned conventions" triumphed over modern sensa- 
tionalism. Wagner is a great genius, a dramatist of power, 
a superb harmonist and all that — we all agree. But it 
is rank Decadence that puts him beside Gluck and Bee- 
thoven. He kept us till half-past one in the morning listen- 
ing to the endless longueurs in which two savages shout at 
each other in monotonous recitatives. Who knows what 
the quarrel is about, and why by the hour together they 
brandish their swords at one another and yet never close? 
Why these discords? Why this never-ending tautophony? 
Why the cacophony? Why the exhausting length? Why 
the deafening blare of brass? The only answers I ever 
heard were because it is German — and because it is 
"weird," new, revolutionary. 

There is nothing weird about Gluck. I heard his Alceste 
in the great amphitheatre of the Trocadero, splendidly per- 
formed in the daylight on the great classical stage without 
curtain, scenery, or footlights. Gluck — not Wagner — 
is the real master of the future. His is the type of musical 
drama — almost as sweet as Mozart, more dramatic than 
Beethoven, less fuliginous and torrential than Wagner. I 
heard Orfeo and Alceste in the same week, and I hold Alceste 
to be quite as fine as the more popular Orfeo. Why is it not 
heard at Covent Garden? As one listened to its glorious 
melodies and stately dialogues in broad daylight on a semi- 
classical stage innocent of curtain, scene-shifting, and lime- 
light, with its free spaces for chorus and processions, one 



PARIS IN 185 1 AND IN I907 42,9 

could imagine what Sophocles and Euripides would have 
been to an Attic audience. What vulgar dogs we must be 
that London has never seen Alceste, being busy with Twad- 
dles and a new turn at the Tivoli ! Ours is the age of 
vulgar dogs. 

Alceste convinced me of what I have long felt, that natural 
daylight, a broad stage, and a fixed architectural scene are 
the best conditions of true drama. iEschylus, Sophocles, 
and Euripides showed their plays in the open air and in full 
light. So did Shakespeare. The footlights, the shifting 
canvas scenes, the lime lantern dodging the "star," are the 
death of real tragedy. They make "staginess" inevitable. 
The silly trick of darkening the auditorium till one cannot 
see one's next neighbour, and often darkening the stage till 
we hear voices but cannot see the speakers — all the other 
tomfooleries of what is called "realism" on the stage — are 
the ruin of art. We do not want realism; we want poetry, 
action, tragedy, and if this cannot be given us without magic- 
lantern tricks, it had better be left alone. The drama will 
never revive till we give up all tricks. 

As I was in quarantine I was not able to visit politicians 
and had to content myself with the newspapers, which, with 
rare exceptions, are the organs of sordid speculators and ad- 
vertising tradesmen. I followed closely the two extraordinary 
strikes, that of the seamen and that of the southern wine- 
growers. Both had the almost unprecedented quality of 
being directed against the legislature — not against em- 
ployers, and concerned with laws not with wages. They 
reveal a sinister condition of modern industry and may be the 
precursors of unexpected social convulsions. They point 
to disintegration and anarchy, class wars and economic 
manias. 

Of the great religious struggle not a trace was to be seen. 



430 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

The Church is disestablished in France, but no change 
whatever can be noticed by the eye. The temples are open 
as usual; Mass and Vespers are said as usual; nothing 
apparently is changed, except that the worshippers are more 
scanty than ever, both in cities and in villages. I entered 
the churches and attended services at all hours both in Paris 
and in the country, and was almost always alone. In one 
large city, the streets and market-place of which were thronged, 
I visited a fine old Norman church that I had known and 
loved as a boy in 1845. Since the days of the Crusaders, 
who had prayed in its walls before they set forth, it has never 
been so empty. In the Chapel of Our Lady a priest was 
muttering his rite without a single worshipper in sight. In 
the fine old Church of Compiegne where Jeanne d'Arc took 
the sacrament when she sallied forth to her last fight before 
the town, I made a pilgrimage to the memory of the purest 
saint in the Calendar of Comte — though she is not in the 
Calendar of Rome. The town was en fete, and five thousand 
patriotic clubmen were meeting to parade before the statue 
of the saviour of France. But in her favourite church I was 
left to my meditations in solitude. 

On Trinity Sunday I joined the service in Notre Dame in 
Paris. How sublime is that survival of the great age of 
Catholic Feudalism! What miracles of devotion, chivalry, 
and art does it not record ! What endless revolutions of 
thought and art, of government and of society, have those 
soaring vaults looked down on unchanged and unyielding ! 
I have always loved the massive dignity of Notre Dame, 
which I have known for fifty-six years, long before its eight 
centuries of masonry and sculpture had been modernised 
by pedants. I came back to it last month, and found its 
fabric, its ritual, its outward form the same, but, save for 
the tourists, it was almost deserted. The worshippers within 



PARIS IN 1 85 1 AND IN I907 43 1 

its enclosure were fifty-two women and twenty-five men. 
But as I listened to the grand music swelling up into those 
exquisite arcades and traceries I felt it still to be the most 
beautiful thing in all Paris — almost the only thing that 
survives of true and pure art. 



XIX 

THE ELGIN MARBLES 

(From "The Nineteenth Century,^' 1890) 

It is surely high time for us to think how and when the Elgin 
Marbles are to be restored to the Acropolis. There they 
will have ultimately to rest ; and the sooner, and the more 
gracefully it is done, the better. The hundred years which 
have passed since they left Athens have entirely changed the 
conditions and the facts. The reasons which were held to 
justify Lord Elgin in removing them, and the British Gov- 
ernment in receiving them, have one and all vanished. All 
those reasons now tell in favour of their being restored to 
their national and natural home. The protection of these 
unique monuments, the interests of students of art, pride 
in a national possession, and the vis inertia of leaving things 
alone, all call aloud to us to replace on that immortal steep 
the sacred fragments where Pericles and Pheidias placed 
them more than two thousand years ago. 

It is usual to say, that in the British Museum these priceless 
works are safe, whilst they would be exposed to danger in 
Athens; that in London the art students of the world can 
study them, whilst at Athens they would be buried out of 
sight; that the Elgin Marbles are now become a "British 
interest" as completely as Domesday Book; that as they have 
belonged to the nation for a century, it is too late to talk about 
disturbing them now. 

Every one of these assertions is a sophism, and the precise 

432 



THE ELGIN MARBLES 433 

contrary is in every -case true. They would be much more 
safe from the hand of man on the Acropolis than they possibly 
could be in London ; and whilst the climate and soot of Blooms- 
bury are slowly affecting their crumbling surface, the pure 
air of the Acropolis would preserve them longer by centuries. 
Athens is now a far more central archaeological school than 
London; and the art students of the world would gain im- 
mensely if the ornaments of the Parthenon could be seen 
again together and beneath the shadow of the Parthenon 
itself. The Parthenon Marbles are to the Greek nation a 
thousand times more dear and more important than they 
ever can be to the English nation, which simply bought them. 
And what are the few years that these dismembered frag- 
ments have been in Bloomsbury when compared with the 
2240 years wherein they stood on the Acropolis? 

The stock argument for retaining the marbles in London 
is that they are safe here, and nobody knows what might 
happen at Athens. In one sense, we trust they are safe in 
London; but they stand in the heart of a great city, and 
no man can absolutely say that the Museum might not be 
destroyed in some great fire in Bloomsbury. As to political 
or riotous commotions, they are no more to be dreaded in 
Athens than they are in London. Whilst Paris, Berlin, 
Vienna, and Rome have been the scenes of fearful street 
battles within late years, there has been nothing of the kind 
at Athens since the establishment of the kingdom. And, 
even if there were, it is inconceivable that either a street 
fight or a fire could touch the Acropolis. One might as well 
say that a row in the Canongate at Edinburgh might destroy 
the colonnade on Calton Hill. Even a bombardment of 
the city of Athens would not touch the Acropolis, except 
with direct malice aforethought. It may be taken for cer- 
tain that the Museum now standing on the summit of the 



434 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Acropolis is a spot ideally protected by nature from any 
conceivable risk of fire, accidental injury, civil or foreign 
war. One can only wish that the contents of the Louvre, 
the National Gallery, and the Vatican were anything like 
as safe. And it so happens that this ideally safe spot for 
preserving priceless relics is the very spot where a glorious 
genius and a wonderful people placed them two thousand 
years ago. 

Admit that the Elgin Marbles are (humanly speaking) 
safe in Bloomsbury from any conceivable risk of fire or riot 
— which is to admit a good deal — still it is certain that 
the climate of Bloomsbury is far more injurious to them 
than the climate of the Acropolis. The climate of the 
Acropolis is certainly the very best for their preservation 
that Europe could afford; and the climate of Bloomsbury 
is certainly one of the worst. Every one knows that the 
marvellous Pentelic marble resists in the Attic air the effect 
of exposure for very long periods whilst its surface is intact. 
When the surface is gone and the cracks begin to pass deep 
into the substance, the deterioration of the marble goes on 
rapidly. Go to our Museum and observe the cruel scars 
that have eaten in parallel lines the breast and ribs of the 
River God (Ihssus). Night and day those scars are being 
subtly filled with London soot. It is no doubt true that 
the antique marbles are occasionally washed and cleaned. 
But at what a cost, and at what a risk! 

Of course the man in Pall Mall or in the club arm-chair 
has his sneer ready — "Are you going to send all statues 
back to the spot where they were found?" That is all 
nonsense. The Elgin Marbles stand upon a footing entirely 
different from all other statues. They are not statues : they 
are architectural parts of a unique building, the most famous 
in the world; a building still standing, though in a ruined 



THE ELGIN MARBLES 435 

state, which is the national symbol and palladium of a gallant 
people, and which is a place of pilgrimage to civilised man- 
Idnd. When civilised man makes his pilgrimage to the 
Acropolis and passes through the Propylaea, he notes the 
exquisite shrine of "Nike Apteros," with part of its frieze 
intact and the rest of the frieze filled up in plaster, because 
the original is in London. He goes on to the "Erechtheion," 
and there he sees that one of the lovely Caryatides who sup- 
port the cornice is a composition cast, because the original 
is in London. He goes on to the Parthenon, and there he 
marks the pediments which Lord Elgin wrecked and left 
a wreck stripped of their figures; he sees long bare slices of 
torn marble, whence the frieze was gutted out, and the 
sixteen holes where the two ambassadors wrenched out the 
Metopes. We English have wrung off and hold essential 
parts of a great national building, which bears wreckage 
on its mangled brow, and which, like (Edipus at Colonus, 
holds up to view the hollow orbs out of which we tore the 
very eyes of Pheidias. 

When Lord Elgin committed this dreadful havoc, he may 
have honestly thought that he was preserving for mankind 
these precious relics. The Turks took no heed of them, 
and the few Greeks could only mutter their feeble groan in 
silence. But everything is now changed. To the Greek 
nation now the ruins on the Acropolis are far more important 
and sacred than are any other national monuments to any 
other people. They form the outward and visible sign of 
the national existence and re-birth. But for the glorious 
traditions of Athens, of which these pathetic ruins are the 
everlasting embodiment, Greece would never have attracted 
the sympathy of the civilised world and would not have been 
assisted to assert herself as a free State. At the foundation 
of it, Corinth, astride on both seas on her isthmus, had 



436 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

many superior claims as a capital. The existence of the 
Acropolis made any capital but Athens impossible, as it 
makes Greece herself incorporated on the base of her ancient 
glory. 

Thus to free Greece the Acropolis is the great national 
symbol: more than the Forum and the Palatine are to 
Rome, more than the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio are 
to Florence, more than Notre Dame and the Louvre are to 
Paris, more than the Abbey, Westminster Hall, and the 
Tower are to London. Rome, Florence, Paris, London, 
have scores of historic monuments and national memorials; 
and they all have many other centuries of ancient history 
and many other phases of national achievement. Athens 
has only one : Greece is centred round Athens : and ancient 
Athens means the Acropolis and its surroundings. 

We profess to be proud of our Tower and Abbey and 
our national monuments. To the patriotic Athenian of to- 
day the Acropolis represents Tower, Abbey, St. Stephen's, 
Westminster Hall, Domesday Book, Magna Carta, and all 
our historic memorials together. He has nothing else; and 
the sight day and night of that vast, lonely, towering mass 
of ruin, with its weird but silent message from the past, pro- 
duces on the subtle imagination of a sensitive people an 
effect infinitely deeper than even our Abbey produces on a 
Londoner. And every morning and evening that the Athe- 
nian raises his eyes to his Abbey he sees the scars where, in 
a time of national humiliation, a rich Englishman wrenched 
off slices of the building to place in his collection at home. 
What would be the feelings of an Englishman if he saw the 
Abbey gutted within this century, and knew that the shrine 
of the Confessor, the tombs of the Kings, the altar screen, 
the chair and sword, and the Purbeck columns from the 
transepts and the Chapter House, had been carried off, 



THE ELGIN MARBLES 437 

during the occupation of the country by a foreign enemy, by 
an amateur with a fine taste for antiques, and a good nose 
for a bargain, to put into his "collection"? The case is far 
stronger than this : for the Elgin Marbles are not statues, or 
tombs ; they form indispensable parts of the most symmet- 
rical building ever raised by man. 

Naturally, the antiques found in Greece form a far more 
important interest to the whole nation than they can to a 
nation which has simply purchased or "conveyed" them. 
No people in the world are so intensely jealous of their 
national memorials as the Greeks of to-day. They form 
their claims to sympathy as a people, the symbol of their 
traditional past, their peculiar claim to a unique interest, 
and no doubt much of what Demetrius the silversmith and 
Alexander the coppersmith told their fellow-citizens was the 
practical value of Diana of the Ephesians. At a moderate 
computation the ruins and the museums are worth £100,000 
a year to the Greek people. They have made stringent laws 
not only to keep every fragment of antiquity in the country, 
but to keep every fresh discovery in the very district and 
spot where it is found. We need not discuss the policy of 
this. A very strong government recently found it impos- 
sible to move the "Hermes" of Praxiteles from Olympia to 
Athens. And no doubt the ruins of Olympia are now worth 
a new railway to the modern inhabitants of Elis. 

Greece is now quite full of museums. In Athens alone 
there are seven or eight, of which three are principal and 
distinct national collections. These, at any rate, are as suit- 
able, as well kept, and as accessible as are the museums of 
any capital in the world. They are year by year, and almost 
month by month, increasing in value and importance. With 
excellent judgment the Greeks have resolved to form a 
special Museum on the rock of the Acropolis, conveniently 



438 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

sunk in the south-eastern angle, in which is placed every 
fragment recovered, not in situ, from any building raised on 
the Acropolis itself. This Museum, small as it is, is already 
to the art-student one of the most indispensable in existence. 
Here are the exquisite reliefs of "Nike"; here are all the 
detached fragments which have been recovered from the 
Parthenon, from pediments, metopes, and frieze; here too 
are the archaic figures from the temples destroyed by Xerxes 
before Salamis. This last feature alone places this little 
Museum in the front rank of the collections of the world 
for purposes of studying the history of art. For the history 
of glyptic art, the Acropolis has within the last twenty 
years become the natural rendezvous of the student. The 
Greeks, Germans, English, and French have founded special 
schools of archaeology, and other nations have formed less 
formal centres of study. The result is that Athens is now 
become a school of archaeology, far more important in 
itself, and far more international in character, than London 
is or ever can be. 

By what right, except that of possession, do we continue to 
withhold from the students and pilgrims who flock to the 
Acropolis from all parts of the civilised world substantive 
portions of the unique building which they come to study, 
those decorations of it which lose half their artistic interest 
and their historic meaning when separated from it by 4000 
miles of sea? The most casual amateur, as well as the 
mere tiro in art, can at once perceive how greatly the Phei- 
dian sculptures gain when they can be seen in the Attic 
sunlight, alongside of the architectural frame for which they 
were made, and at least under the shadow of the building 
of which they form part. The ruined colonnades are neces- 
sary to explain the carvings; and the carvings give life and 
voice to the ruined colonnades. These demigods seem to 



THE ELGIN MARBLES 439 

pine and mope in the London murk; in their native sun- 
Hght the fragments seem to breathe again. 

On the Acropohs itself every fragment from Pheidias's 
brain seems as sacred and as venerable as if it were the 
very bones of a hero. In a London Museum they are objects 
of curious interest, like the Dodo or the Rosetta stone — 
most instructive and of intense interest — but they are not 
relics, such as make the spot w^hereon we stand sacred in 
our eyes, as do the tombs of the Edwards or the graves 
of the poets in our Abbey. In the British Museum the 
excellent directors, feeHng how much the genius loci affects 
these Elgin Marbles, have placed models, casts, and various 
devices to explain to the visitor the form of the Acropolis 
and the place of these carvings in the Parthenon. They 
try to bring the Acropolis into our Elgin Room at Blooms- 
bury, instead of sending the contents of the Elgin Room to 
the Acropolis ! One might as well imagine that the tombs 
of the kings in our Abbey had been carried off to put in a 
museum in St. Petersburg, and that the Russian keeper of 
the antiquities had set up a model of the Abbey beside them, 
in order to give the Muscovite public a faint sense of the 
genius loci. 

It is enough to make the cheek of an honest Englishman 
burn when he first sees the ghastly rents which British (North 
British) taste tore out of this temple, and then passes into 
the humble museum below where the remnants are pre- 
served. They are not so important as our Elgin trophies, 
but they are very important — beautiful, unique, and quite 
priceless. And then come long ranges of casts — the origi- 
nals in London — and so the whole series is maimed and 
disfigured. In the case of at least one metope the Acropolis 
Museum possesses one half, the other half of which is in 
London. So that of a single group, the invention of a con- 



440 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

summate genius, and the whole of which is extant, London 
shows half in marble and half in plaster cast, and the Acropo- 
Us shows the other half in marble and the rest in plaster. 
Surely it were but decent, if we honestly respect great art, 
that the original should be set up as a whole. But it seems 
that in the present century we show our profound venera- 
tion for a mighty genius by splitting one of his works into 
two and exhibiting the fragments severed at opposite cor- 
ners of Europe, as mediaeval monks thought their country's 
honour consisted in exhibiting here a leg and here an arm 
of some mythical patron saint. 

No one in his senses would talk about restoring the Par- 
thenon, and no one dreams of replacing the marbles in the 
Pediments. What might be done is to replace the Northern 
Frieze of "Nike Apteros," and restore the Caryatid to her 
sisters beneath the cornice of " Erechtheion. " The differ- 
ence between the effect of the Pheidian fragments as seen in 
Bloomsbury and that of the Pheidian fragments as seen 
on the Acropolis is one that only ignorance and vulgarity 
could mistake. Who would care for the Virgins, Saints, and 
"Last Judgements" from the portals of Amiens, Reims, or 
Chartres if they were stuck on pedestals and catalogued 
at Bloomsbury, with or without cork models of the 
cathedral ? 

The notion that the interests of art demand the retention 
of parts of a great building in a foreign country is a mere 
bit of British Philistinism and art gabble. The true interests 
of art demand that the fragments which time and man have 
spared of the most interesting building in the world should 
be seen together, seen in their native sky and under all the 
complex associations of that most hallowed spot. One 
might as well argue that the interests of art would be served 
if Michel Angelo's "Last Judgement" were stripped oif the 



THE ELGIN MARBLES 44I 

Sistine wall, cut up into square blocks, and hung in gold 
frames in Trafalgar Square. 

It is idle now to reopen the story of the original plunder. 
British self-complacency has long been content with the old 
maxim — fieri non debuit, factum valet. Happily the Eng- 
lish name and our national literature has cleared itself of 
offence by a noble protest which will outlive the names both 
of Elgin and of Herostratus. Byron said not one word too 
much. But since the days of Byron and Lord Elgin every- 
thing has changed. Athens is now a city as regularly gov- 
erned, as much frequented, and nearly as large as Florence 
or Venice. The Greek nation, small as it is, is as much 
entitled to honourable consideration as Holland, Belgium, 
Denmark, or Switzerland. The familiar sneers of Pall Mall 
and Fleet Street about Greek democracy and the Hellenic 
blood have nothing to do with the matter. Greece is now 
a friendly nation with a regular government. It has also 
within recent years become a settled country, open to all 
men, and one of the great centres of art study for the civilised 
world. To Greece the Acropolis is more important than are 
Malta and Gibraltar to England. The question is how long 
this country, in an ignorant assumption of "the interests of 
art," will continue to inflict a wholly disproportionate humilia- 
tion on a small but sensitive and otherwise friendly people. 

How the restoration could be managed it is not worth 
discussing here. Obviously by some kind of international 
treaty. The bulk of the Parthenon, of course, is now on 
the Acropolis. But London holds the most precious rem- 
nants from both Pediments. Paris, it seems, has one of the 
South Metopes, some fragments from the West Pediment, 
and a small section of the East Frieze. London has fifteen 
Metopes, out of the original ninety-two. What remains of 
the rest are still in situ, or in the Acropolis Museum. Lon- 



442 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

don has the larger part of the South, North, and East Frieze ; 
the remainder is on the AcropoHs, except a section at Paris. 
Happily the noble West Frieze remains nearly perfect in 
situ. Thus the Acropolis now contains : — 

1. All that remains of the Building itself. 

2. Some grand fragments from both Pediments. 

3. All that remains of ninety-two Metopes, except sixteen. 

4. About one-third of what exists of the Frieze.^ 

The question is, How can all these sections be reunited 
on the Acropolis? Obviously by an international treaty, in 
which France, for reasons that need not be stated, would 
willingly join. She would be proud to lay down her petty 
fragments on the altar of Athene, for the pleasure of seeing 
Albion disgorge. The Greeks would accept any terms : — 

Hoc Ithacus velit, et magno mercentur Atridae. 

It would not consist with our honour to make a paltry 
bargain. Let the 35,000 pieces of silver (or was it gold?) 
that we paid to Milord perish with him. We shall restore 
the Parthenon Marbles much as we restored the Ionian 
Islands and Heligoland to their national owners, because 
we value the good name of England more than unjust plun- 
der. If the barkers of Pall Mall and the opposition rags 
have to be quieted , let us give them to munch a commercial 
treaty. A little Free Trade with England would satisfy the 
growlers, and would do the Greeks permanent good. But 
let us have no higgling. Let us do the right thing with a 
free hand. 

Was it too much to hope that such a treaty might be 
made by the Englishman whom the world knows as the 

1 These proportions are stated roughly, for the general argument, and 
not with archaeological pretensions. I know that the archselogists bark 
and growl at a lay interloper, like the street dogs of Constantinople at 
a strange cur. 



THE ELGIN MARBLES 443 

lover of Homer, and whom the Hellenes of to-day always 
associate with their country and their hopes? He earned 
the gratitude of Greeks, the thanks of England, and the 
respect of honest men everywhere when he restored the 
Western Islands to their own countrymen. He might have 
earned a more enduring and touching gratitude by replacing 
on the sublime rock wherein centre so many of the memories 
of mankind those inimitable marbles which Pericles and 
Pheidias set up there in a supreme moment of the world's 
history. It is a cruel mockery, in the name of "high art," 
to leave them scattered about the galleries of Europe. 

All the circumstances are entirely changed since the Elgin 
Marbles were removed in 1801. The Greek nation is now 
a free, independent, and civilised nation in Europe. Their 
claim to national importance rests very largely on their his- 
toric associations. They are keen enough to know that 
this title greatly depends on the value they set on these 
associations. Historic symbols, antiquities, and the posses- 
sion of the Holy Places of ancient poetry and art, are thus 
to the Greeks quite as important as an army or a fleet, and 
indeed much more so. The nation is thus quite fanatically 
jealous of its national monuments, which play a larger part 
in Greece than in other modern nations. As a matter of 
fact, the museums and antiquities of Greece are now very, 
well and carefully protected : the Acropolis is now far more 
secure from conceivable accident than is the museum in 
Bloomsbury. The idea that under any possible conditions 
the Acropolis is likely to be exposed to modern artillery fire 
is one that those who have ever seen it can only laugh at. 
The whole Acropolis is fenced and guarded just as the 
British Museum is. If a drunken sailor ever did any damage, 
it could only be by escaping the guards, just as a madman 
once smashed our Portland vase. 



444 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Athens is now a central art school for all nations, and 
since the opening of the railway to Salonica and Constanti- 
nople, is frequented like Venice, or Florence; and to all 
Europe that lies south and east of Munich, it is at least as 
accessible as London. The idea that Athens is a place as 
wild and remote as Baghdad, where Albanians and drunken 
sailors engage in faction fights, whose streets are a sort of 
Petticoat Lane and Whitechapel, and where an occasional 
Milord arrives with his dragoman and tents, is an idea 
derived from the "travels" of our youth. Athens is now a 
city as well policed, as orderly, as cultivated, and as full 
of intelligent visitors as any of the towns of Germany, 
Italy, or France. As a centre of archaeological study, to the 
whole world, Old and New, Athens is now a more important 
school than London. 

All these arguments are mere pretexts to bolster up — 
possession. They would equally apply to all other national 
monuments which a stronger power desired to keep from a 
weaker. When Napoleon I. ransacked the churches and 
galleries of Italy, the French also could talk big about the 
superior safety of Paris, the miserable carelessness of the 
Italians, the paramount interests of High Art, and their 
own noble capital as the centre of civilisation. When 
Napoleon HI. captured Rome, when Bismarck captured 
Paris, each might have carried off the contents of the Vati- 
can and the Louvre, to take them out of the keeping of a 
degenerate race who were always bringing an enemy about 
their ears, and to guard these works of art as a precious 
inheritance "for the use and profit of mankind." 

I appeal to the public conscience, for the sake of Eng- 
land's good name and in the true interests of art as a moral 
and a social force. In that appeal I have been warmly 
supported both at home and abroad. And by love for 



THE ELGIN MARBLES 445 

England and for Art, I understand something wider and 
more human than sneers at the barbarism of the foreigner 
and the simpering of dilettanti over objects in glass-cases- 
I would rather see our island "inviolate," by virtue of her 
generous bearing to all, than by the menace of her guns and 
the trophies she may have won in battle. And to me the 
love of Art is inseparable from love and reverence for the 
great artist, for the dust whereon he trod and with which he 
is mingled, with the genius loci of the temple of art which 
he raised and loved, and with the national traditions to which 
even the noblest art can add but a mere deepening of the 
glow. 



XX 

A POMPEII FOR THE THIRTIETH 
CENTURY 

{From " The Nineteenth Century,^' 1890) 

We live in an age of archseological research; and there 
never was a time when so much industry and genius were 
given to restore for the men of to-day the exact hfe of our 
ancestors in the past. All ages, all races, all corners of the 
planet have been ransacked to yield up their buried me- 
morials of distant times. Rome, Pompeii, Athens, Olym- 
pia, Delphi, Asia Minor, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, India, 
Mexico, have rewarded the learned digger with priceless 
relics. The Rosetta stone, the Behistun rock, the Fayum, 
have revealed entire epochs of civilisation to our delighted 
eyes. We have a passion for looking backwards — and it is 
one of our most worthy and most useful pursuits. There is 
one age, however, for which our archaeological zeal does 
nothing. We are absorbed in thinking about our ancestors: 
why do we not give a thought to our descendants? Should 
we not provide something for posterity? Let us, once in a 
way, take to looking forwards; and, with all our archaeo- 
logical experience and all the resources of science, deliber- 
ately prepare a Pompeii, a Karnak, a Hissarlik, for the 
students of the thirtieth century. 

Every student of history knows that the vast superiority 
we possess to-day over the age of Shakespeare and Bacon 

446 



A NEW POMPEII 447 

in our accurate understanding of the past is due to the anti- 
quarian research and the marvellous discoveries of the eigh- 
teenth and the nineteenth centuries. The unearthing of 
Pompeii, of the Forum, the Acropolis, of Budrun, the tombs 
along the Nile, and the palaces of Nineveh, the deciphering 
of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, of the arrow-head inscriptions, 
of Gnossos, the Fayum, Delphi, of the Etruscan tombs, of 
the Runic monuments, the recovery of the Institutes of 
Gaius by Niebuhr, the collection of the Vatican Manu- 
scripts, the labours of such men as Niebuhr, Mommsen, 
Savigny, Curtius, Canina, Eepsius, Brugsch, Layard, Mas- 
pero, Lanciani, Budge, Petrie, Evans, Hogarth; the editing 
of the State Papers — all that is represented by the British 
Museum, the Record Office, the Louvre, Boulak, Olympia, 
Delphi, and the libraries of Berlin and the Vatican — have 
enabled historians accurately to present to our minds the 
thoughts, the life, the very look of the past. After infinite 
labour and through cruel disappointments, we are beginning 
to feel the unbroken biography of the human race as a 
single and intelligible story. 

And yet how incessant the labour by which these triumphs 
have been won ! How heartrending the disappointments, 
how cruel the waste, how irreparable the loss ! We, the 
heirs of time, stand, like Crusoe the morning after the wreck, 
mournfully surveying the destruction, and eagerly picking up 
the priceless fragments that chance and the elements have 
spared. The glorious ship was but a mass of splinters ; his 
comrades lay tossing with the seaweed beneath the waves; 
the stores and tools, merchandise, food, arms, books, instru- 
ments and charts were swept into the deep, whilst here and 
there he could pick out a gun, a saw, some damaged biscuit 
and a soaked Bible. It was his all. So we rescue now and 
then the torso of a Melian Aphrodite, a Vatican Testament, 



448 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

the Domesday Survey, a fresco from the Palatine or the 
tombs of the Egyptian and Assyrian kings. 

But, if we had the seventy plays of ^Eschylus, the hundred 
and more of Sophocles, the whole of Polybius, of Livius, of 
Tacitus, if we had Dante's entire writings in his own manu- 
script, if we had an authentic, perfect holograph Shake- 
speare, if we had intact one single statue of the great age, 
one absolutely genuine portrait of some ancient hero, poet, 
or thinker ! If we could only imagine what the Agamemnon 
or the Clouds sounded like, as men sat and listened on the 
tiers of the Theatre of Dionysus ! Whole lives have been 
spent in trying to restore for us the "Zeus" or the "Athene" 
of Pheidias, as they shone forth all ivory and gold ; in recall- 
ing to life an Egyptian sacred procession, a Roman triumph, 
a mediaeval army, a pilgrimage to Canterbury or Jerusalem. 
How cruelly chance has gone against us ! Cursed was the 
fire that consumed the "Cnidian Aphrodite" of Praxiteles; 
abhorred be the sea which overwhelmed Michel Angelo's de- 
signs for the "Inferno" ! If science had been able then to 
preserve for us but a tithe of the precious things which fire, 
water, air, the brutal ignorance of man, the blear-eyed 
stupidity of monks, the ambition of kings, the greed of 
traders, and the slow all-consuming dust of ages have de- 
stroyed ! If some contemporary photograph could have pre- 
sented for us the faces of Pericles, Socrates, Virgil, Alfred, 
Columbus, Shakespeare; or the Parthenon as it looked on 
the day of its dedication; or the Forum, when Julius tri- 
umphed over the Gauls ! If some phonograph could repeat 
to us the very tones of yEschylus reading his Prometheus, or 
Virgil's as he recited the sixth Mneid to Augustus, or the 
very voice of Saint Bernard at the Council of Sens, or of 
Shakespeare as he played the Ghost in Hamlet ? Or — oh 
that the invention of printing could have been antedated, 



A NEW POMPEII 449 

and that we had exact copies of the entire works of Tyrtaeus 
and Sappho, of Menander and Ennius, of Archimedes, Aris- 
totle, and Pythagoras ! If but one library, one cathedral, 
one castle, one market-place of the Middle Ages had been 
preserved for us untouched, unfaded, with all its surround- 
ings perfect ! 

The proposal I make is this. Let the science and learn- 
ing of the twentieth century do for the thirtieth century what 
we would give millions sterling to buy, if the tenth century 
A.D., or the tenth century B.C., had been able and willing to 
do it for us. In other words, let us deliberately, with all 
the resources of modem science, and by utilising all its 
wonderfiil instruments, prepare for future ages a sort of 
Pompeii or Boulak museum, or Vatican library, wherein the 
language, the literature, the science, the art, the life, the 
manners, the appearance of our own age and its best repre- 
sentatives may be treasured up as a sacred deposit for the 
instruction of our distant descendants. Let us no longer 
leave it to chance whether our knowledge and our life be 
preserved for them or not. Let us do all that forethought, 
experience, and science can do to perpetuate the best products 
and the noblest men of the present age. The thing is done 
in every royal and important family. Portraits are accumu- 
lated by each generation to give to its successors the living 
effigy of its ancestors. All published books are by law de- 
posited in the British Museum. A complete series of all 
coins, seals, and medals is carefully preserved in more than 
one public institution. Coins form, perhaps, the most ab- 
solutely trustworthy and continuous series of monuments in 
the whole range of our materials for historic research ; for 
they alone are able to withstand the attacks of time. It is 
usual, when a public building is begun, to place, in a cere- 
monial manner, a series of coins, a few documents, and a 



450 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

copy of the Times newspaper under the first stone. That 
is indeed a futile and trivial mode of providing for the histo- 
ric research of ages to come. But it contains the principle. 
And the present proposal is simply to do, on a truly national 
scale, and in a complete, systematic, and scientific mode, M^hat 
on a local scale, and in a shamefaced, serio-comic style, and 
with much tomfoolery of the aldermanic sort, we do, up and 
down the country, a dozen times in every year. 

The problem is this — to preserve for the next ten (or even 
twenty) centuries a small museum in which we may store a 
careful selection of those products of to-day which we think 
will be most useful and instructive to our distant descendants. 
The conditions to be observed are these : — 

1. A place, as far as human foresight can tell, secure from 
any possible change, physical, social, industrial, or mechani- 
cal — so strong, so remote, so protected that nothing but 
great labour, scientific appliances, and public authority could 
ever again disturb it. 

2. The construction in such a spot of a National Safe, 
on a simple scale and at moderate cost, scientifically contrived 
to protect valuable things in deposit ; but such as to awaken 
no possible opposition from artistic, economical, political, or 
religious susceptibilities. 

3. An arrangement so that each century, in its turn, might 
have access to its own safe, without disturbing the rest. 

4. The placing therein a rational and fairly representative 
collection of the best works, memorials, and specimens of 
our own age. 

5. The construction of such a museum within moderate 
limits and at a practicable cost. 

6. The protection of the museum by some public sanction 
and national authority. 

Let us examine each of these conditions in detail. 



A NEW POMPEII 451 

I. A strong room, which is to last ten centuries, must be 
placed far from any city, in a remote spot not liable to be 
wanted. If it were in the capital, or indeed anywhere near 
the haunts of man, some Sir Edward Watkin, or J. S. Forbes 
of the future, would be driving a railway through it, or make 
it, perhaps, the central Balloon Terminus of the Universe. 
Like St. Paul's, the Tower of London, or Westminster 
Abbey, it might be wanted by the enterprising engineer, or a 
syndicate about to found a new electric city or a continent 
in the air. I propose a spot, like Salisbury Plain, which it is 
difl&cult to imagine that even Sir Edward Watkin could 
ever persuade Parliament to give him, or that even in the 
thirtieth century could ever be included in the suburbs of 
London. Say Salisbury Plain, a spot beside Stonehenge; 
nay, it might be incorporated with Stonehenge itself, and 
thus link the centuries a.d. to those B.C. 

II. No building of any kind would be safe; and none is 
wanted. A Pyramid would serve the purpose ; but we have 
no Pharaohs and no Chosen People; and though Pyramids 
may be built without straw, we cannot as yet build them 
without hands. Any building, however massive, may be 
destroyed. Fire, war, insurrection, greed, taste, caprice, 
and necessity have it down in the end. The Tower of Babel, 
Babylon itself, the Colosseum, and the Temple of Ephesus, 
have all gone the way of all brick and stone. Besides, a 
building would cost much money. It would provoke the 
communists, the contractors, and the art societies to destroy 
it, or convert it. Lord Grimthorpe would want to restore it. 
And he, William Morris, and Mr. Cavendish Bentinck would 
squirt vitriol at each other about it, and its destiny. No ! 
A building of any kind is quite out of the question, and none 
is wanted. 

All that we want is a vaulted chamber. And this must be 



452 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

subterranean. It would practically occupy no space at all 
on the surface, or none that any man could ever want. A 
hundred pounds might buy the site, or we might utilise a 
disused mine or drive a gallery underneath Skiddaw or the 
Malvern Hills, Nothing is simpler than a few vaults — dug, 
say, beside Stonehenge, cased twenty feet thick with the 
strongest known cement. A plain granite portal with a suit- 
able inscription would be the sole architectural feature. 
When finished and filled, the museum would be solemnly 
closed up with twenty or thirty feet of cement, and a plain 
granite block between the granite piers would finally bar the 
entrance. There would be neither doors, keys, nor locks. 
Nothing but a gang of navvies, working for weeks under a 
staff of engineers, could ever open it again. It would need 
no guarding, no insurance, and no outlay. Fire, destruction, 
contractors, even an earthquake, could not touch it. So long 
as this island keeps its head above the German Ocean, so 
long the National Safe would exist. 

III. The National Safe might consist of a gallery with a 
series of subterranean vaults, like the catacombs at Rome, 
or the chambers under the Pyramids. The scheme might 
be carried to any extent; but for simpHcity we may limit 
our views to the next ten centuries, and provide ten vaults, 
each thirty or forty feet square, with perhaps a double or treble 
space for the tenth. Each vault would contain a careful 
collection of products, works, inscriptions, pictures, books, 
instruments, and the like, of the nineteenth century. Each 
vault might be opened officially by some public authority and 
with legislative sanction only, on the last year of each century. 
As the collection would be in duplicate, each vault containing 
practically the same objects, there would be no inducement 
to anticipate the ages by opening any vault before the ap- 
pointed time. Each century, having opened its own vault, 



A NEW POMPEII 453 

might make its own deposit, seal it up, and finally close the 
general entrance in the same way, or as its own improved 
scientific knowledge might suggest. The tenth vault might 
hold a special and fuller collection, as being the more distant 
and liable to decay. 

IV. As to the mode of preservation the present writer 
would rather make no suggestions. It is a problem for 
engineers, physicists, mechanicians, opticians, photographers, 
architects, and specialists of various kinds. It might call out 
a body of ingenious suggestions ; and the problem appeals to 
great numbers of experts. How can we preserve untouched 
for a thousand years books, pictures, records, portraits, 
models, instruments, coins, medals, specimens, and products 
of various kinds ? We may assume that, as an outside casing, 
some form of cement, to some thickness yet to be determined, 
would be an almost absolute protection from fire, water, 
plunder, and even a restoration committee. Inscriptions 
cut upon lava and cased with glass might be trusted to see 
out the life of the planet. Let experts tell us how to protect 
books. A few precious poems or the like might be printed 
on vellum or composition, and secured in hermetically-sealed 
glass cases. Photogravures on stone, similarly protected 
and with all light excluded, might remain for centuries. A 
few choice paintings, if needful on panel, or on porcelain or 
ivory, might be sealed up in air-tight boxes. If experts could 
suggest a mode of protecting photographs from decay, or of 
transferring a photographic picture to some indestructible 
substance, it is clear that we might preserve for the thirtieth 
century photographic portraits of our great men, views of 
our public buildings, of our daily Hfe, of many a historic 
incident. 

What would Lord Rosebery or the Duke of Westminster 
bid at Christie's for a permanent photograph on porcelain of 



454 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

Augustus at supper with Virgil, Horace, and Ovid round him, 
or of Alfred sitting in council at Winchester, or of Edward 
the First in his first Parliament, or the signing of Magna 
Carta, or the battle of Agincourt, or even Elizabeth listening 
to a play of Shakespeare ? And why should not the phono- 
graph be tried also? The Laureate would recite the Prin- 
cess, and his chosen bits from In Memoriam into a phono- 
graphic box, which it would be the business of Mr. Edison 
to protect for a thousand years. A copy of the Encyclopcedia 
Britannica would give the thirtieth century an adequate idea 
of our present knowledge and opinions. Mr. Gladstone and 
Lord Salisbury, Lord Rosebery and Professor Huxley, might 
live again by photograph, phonograph, and preserved speeches 
and writings. A copy of Hansard, of the Times, of the 
Graphic, of Bradshaw, of Whitaker's Almanack, of the Nine- 
teenth Century, a set of Ordnance maps, the British Museum 
Catalogue, the catalogues of the Art galleries, would teach the 
thirtieth century more about the nineteenth than a thou- 
sand scholars have been able to teach us about the tenth. 
If one had but a Whitaker's Almanack for the year i a.d. 
or for the year looo, or 1300, or even 1600! Models of a 
locomotive, of an ironclad first-rate, of the Forth Bridge, of 
the House of Commons, might be thrown in, along with a 
dressed doll representing the Prime Minister or a fine lady 
dressed for a drawing-room. There is no limit to the exact 
and interesting information which we might store up for the 
use of our posterity, if science will only show us how to pre- 
serve photographic pictures indefinitely, and how to protect 
books, drawings, paintings, instruments, and specimens for 
a thousand years. 

A wide field would be open to our physicists and inventors 
to discover processes by which things in daily use could be 
protected against decay and the action of the elements. 



A NEW POMPEII 455 

Whether any metal, or some form of porcelain, or a compo- 
sition be the better material, we need not decide. It might be 
worth while to place specimens of various materials together, 
so as to give posterity the means of judging which material, 
under exactly the same conditions, ultimately proves the most 
desirable. But, having found a suitable material, or a suit- 
able casing, the most delicate and fragile of our ordinary 
surroundings might be preserved for our most distant de- 
scendants. Portraits by hand and by photographic process 
of our foremost statesmen, poets, thinkers, and men of mark, 
copies of our most important books, catalogues, plans, maps, 
views, dictionaries, and the like, would be of surpassing in- 
terest a thousand years hence. If the phonograph could be 
protected from decay, the thirtieth century might listen to a 
speech by Mr. Gladstone, a poem by the Laureate, a song 
by Madame Patti, and a sonata by M. Joachim. Sets of 
the Ordnance maps, plans, geographical atlases, post-office 
directories, catalogues of public libraries, and dictionaries 
of various kinds would be useful to distant ages. Let us 
reflect on the unique value to the historian of the rare official 
documents which have survived — the Domesday Survey, 
the Great Charter, the English Chronicle, meagre and acci- 
dental as these notices too often are. Of what extreme value 
to the historian of the thirtieth century would be the posses- 
sion of a complete official record of England in the twentieth 
century ! 

There are a few things to which attention might be specially 
directed, as being such as are liable to disappear altogether, 
or such as are certain to undergo continual change. Such 
are plans of great cities and great public buildings, maps of 
the country, marine and geological charts, pictures and de- 
scriptions of the actual fauna and flora. Special care might 
be given to preserve for distant ages some exact record of the 



456 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

animals and plants which there is too much reason to fear 
will have disappeared from the planet long before many 
centuries have passed. It is a melancholy reflection that 
our descendants will never see a most beautiful, useful, and 
unique substance — which we so carelessly abuse and waste 
— ivory. The elephant, the last of the great mammoth 
tribe, which savage fools kill for "sport," and foolish savages 
kill for gain, can hardly last another century on this planet. 
In the thirtieth century the elephant will be a memory far 
more distant than the mammoth. And with the elephant 
will disappear no doubt the seal, the whale, and all the 
marine mammals, whose habits and form expose them to the 
reckless cupidity of man. By the thirtieth century we may 
fear that all the larger wild mammals will have disappeared — 
certainly the elephant, the rhinoceros, the giraffe, the hippo- 
potamus, with all rare i\frican beasts; no doubt also, the 
lion, the tiger, the bear, the buffalo, and their congeners. 

Of course the wolf, the fox, the chamois, the antelope, the 
wild boar, the kangaroo, and the like, are doomed to early 
extinction before the march of civilisation and the vile thirst 
for "sport." We ought not to leave to our descendants the 
task of piecing together their scattered bones, as we have 
had to do for the Megatherium and the Dinornis. Of all 
the fauna which we may reasonably expect to be "extinct" a 
thousand years hence, we ought to leave our posterity an 
exact and full record. 

In the same way, we ought to leave them a record of the 
actual state of this planet and our island. When we reflect 
on the enormous value to us of the travels of Herodotus, of 
the paintings on Egyptian monuments, of the engraved plan 
of the Forum, of the Bayeux tapestry, of the Hereford Mappa 
Mundi, and of a few rude sketches in illuminated manu- 
scripts, we may estimate what it would be to our descendants 



A NEW POMPEII 457 

to have full, accurate, and contemporary maps and plans of 
England as it stands to-day. London in the thirtieth century 
may be as desolate as Birs Nimroud or Egyptian Thebes. 
What a boon will it be to the New Zealand globe-trotter of 
2908, as he sits on the last broken arch of London Bridge to 
which his electric balloon is moored, and takes his luncheon 
of ambrosia and manna, to have by his side, as he tries to trace 
the mound which covers St. Paul's and the Abbey, an electro- 
photographic reprint of the Ordnance plan of 1908 ! And 
if to this plan of the ancient city he could add authentic views 
of London, as it appeared in the dim light of hoar antiquity, 
how well-informed, to the ninth power of a German professor, 
would be our young friend from the Antipodes ! 

It may be said that these things will take care of them- 
selves, and that all which is useful will survive. A few great 
books no doubt will survive a thousand years and more. 
But there will be infinite interest a thousand years hence in the 
ordinary books of information which are very likely to perish. 
Our curious young New Zealander of 2908 would no doubt 
much prefer a Whitaker's Almanack or a Bradshaw's Rail- 
way Guide of 1908 to all the works of Mr. Froude or Robert 
Browning. Which would we rather have to-day — the epics 
of Lucius Varius, or a Post-Office Directory of Rome under 
Augustus ? These things should not be left to chance. 

V. And now comes the question : — Plow is this to be 
paid for, and how is it to be done? A question not so diffi- 
cult as it seems. In a normal state of society, one would 
say that it was the business of the State or the Church. But 
there is no State and no Church now-a-days : these are obso- 
lete legal formulas. If Mr. Balfour proposed it, Mr. Hardie 
would foam at him with indignant patriotism. If Mr. 
Asquith proposed it, the Suffragettes would mock at him, 
as the children mocked at Elisha the Prophet, saying, " Go 



458 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

up, thou bald head!" And if the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury proposed it, the Dissenters would rise up as one man. 
And if Dr. Clifford suggested it, Churchmen would see in it 
a fresh attack on their beloved Establishment. So State 
and Church are alike out of the question : both are reduced 
to a condition of deadlock. 

It must be done by voluntary effort and by free gift, if 
at all. Perhaps, if the Treasury were not asked for a penny, 
they would consent to giving the movement some simple 
legislative authority, or the sanction of a Royal Commission. 
The outlay in money would be very moderate, for neither 
costly building nor valuable site is needed. All that is abso- 
lutely wanted is a small catacomb somewhere in a remote 
waste, such as Salisbury Plain, not more expensive to make 
than a few vaults in a cemetery. The objects stored would 
not be intrinsically of much market value; or, if they were, 
they might be looked for as free gifts. The difficulty of 
the committee of selection would be to refuse, to reject, to 
exclude. Artists, authors, inventors, and producers of all 
kinds would be only too eager to deposit works which would 
be destined to so distant and certain an immortality. A 
Greek or Roman temple was cram full of votive offerings 
of great beauty, inscribed with the names of donor and 
artist, which century after century remained to delight and 
instruct posterity. We gaze to-day with profound pathos on 
the simple words — KAAAI AS ANE@HKEN HTPPOS 
EnOIH2EN — Callias dedicated this: Pyrrhus made it. 
What, if the temple of Delphi, or the Cella of the Parthenon, 
or the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, had been, with all their 
contents, sunk in the earth and hermetically sealed until our 
day ! With what wonder and joy should we proceed to 
open and survey the sacred treasure-chamber ! And what 
artist or patron of art would not long to inscribe his name 



A NEW POMPEII 459 

on the offerings which would one day be the object of such 
interest ? 

If Sir Frederick Leighton had dedicated thus his " Psyche," 
Sir J. Millais his "Chill October," Mr. Watts his "Portrait 
of Mr. Gladstone," the Laureate his Poems printed on 
vellum, Mr. Ruskin the manuscript original of the Modern 
Painters with his own sketches for his published works, if 
Mr. Gladstone had given his correspondence, if Lord Roths- 
child would offer a collection of historical curios, and some 
other collectors would supply cases of autograph writings 
and letters, a series of contemporary portraits and the like, 
posterity would have had an archaeological "find" such as 
never before occurred in history. Permission to inscribe 
the name of author or donor would be enough to cause the 
committee of selection to be inundated with offers and over- 
whelmed with gifts. 

For this reason it would be necessary to clothe the com- 
mittee of selection with a national character and some 
legislative sanction. A Royal Commission of men repre- 
senting Art, Science, Literature, Industry, and Statistics, 
could easily manage an undertaking far simpler than a 
Great Exhibition. Let us have a rest from Great Exhibi- 
tions for a year or two; and try to organise a posthumous 
Exhibition for the benefit of posterity. As to funds, since 
we cannot effect a post obit for the amount, or draw a cheque 
on the thirtieth century, a simple contrivance will suffice. 
It will be reasonable that the portal of the National Safe 
should contain a statement of its origin and purpose; and 
such statement would naturally include the names of those 
who assist it. A statement with a list of all who share in 
the work might fairly be inscribed both within and without 
the chamber. 

VI. All that is needed further by way of legislative sane- 



460 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

tion would be a short Act, which perhaps would not be 
blocked by the most desperate obstructive, to the effect that 
the National Safe was to be held as incorporated with the 
British Museum, held in trust for the nation by the trustees 
of the Museum, and protected from wanton injury by the 
law for the time being applying to the protection of works 
of art and interest in the national collections. From its 
own enormous strength, the National Safe would not be 
liable to accidental or mischievous destruction. And as it 
would contain nothing of market value, it would never be 
exposed to plunder, even during war or insurrection. Ac- 
cess to it in any case would be physically difficult : a matter 
of prolonged engineering labour. But to prevent the pre- 
mature examination of its contents, out of mere curiosity 
and impatience, the Act should provide that it could only 
be opened by formal national authority, and by Act of 
Parliament ad hoc, or such supreme legislative Act as may 
hereafter replace our Acts of Parliament of to-day. 

If, with means so simple, and without any call on the 
public purse, so useful an end can be obtained, there seems 
to be no reasonable objection to making the attempt. Its 
enormous value and interest to our distant descendants is 
obvious. That posterity has done nothing for us is a clap- 
trap objection which we need not stop to notice. Nothing 
could be more useful than to think about posterity's in- 
terests more seriously than we do, to leave fewer things to 
chance, and to husband and store the perishable things of 
this earth. The lesson of history is continually reminding 
us of the cruel and wanton destruction wrought by genera- 
tion after generation, each in brutal indifference to its suc- 
cessor. Forests, plantations, animal races, mines, and a 
thousand useful things are being consumed or driven from 
the face of the ea,rth. A few centuries more and the hu- 



A NEW POMPEII 461 

man race will have exhausted gold, silver, coal, ivory, fur, 
whalebone, and perhaps oak and mahogany. Substitutes 
of course will be found; but cat-skins are not so nice as 
sable, aluminium is not so beautiful as gold, and chemical 
or vegetable compounds are a poor makeshift for ivory. It 
is fearful to think of all the waste and destruction that 
each age has wrought on the products of the last. The ruin 
of the Acropolis and the Forum in sheer wantonness; the 
burning of the Alexandrian Museum; the loss of priceless 
works of human genius ; the statues of Praxiteles and Scopas 
burnt to make mortar ; Greek dramas and Roman institutes 
erased to write over them patristic homilies; temples de- 
stroyed by Vandals, by Catholics, by Saracens, or Norman 
adventurers; mediaeval cathedrals gutted by Anabaptists, 
Independents, and Protestant zealots generally. And what 
Protestant bigotry has spared, in our own day is "restored" 
away by Puginesque committees and Lord Grimthorpe's 
learning. Quod non fecerunt Barbari, fecere Barberini. Let 
us turn over a new leaf, and lay by out of our abundance a 
trifle for the use of posterity. 

A friend tells me that all this is but a fresh example of 
the self-consciousness of the century. I would rather say 
of its "historical-mindedness," as the jargon has it. It is 
the duty of an age to be self-conscious, and to reflect how 
its acts and its thoughts will appear in the eyes of a distant 
posterity. It is mere affectation to deny that our doings 
and our lives will be as interesting to the men of the thirtieth 
century as the doings and the lives of the tenth century are 
to us. It may well be that our descendants may smile at 
the simplicity, the ignorance, and the faults of their ances- 
tors, and may hold very cheaply indeed much that we prize 
to-day. It will be a useful lesson to them to know what it 
was that we thought most precious or most worthy to pre- 



462 REALITIES AND IDEALS 

serve. And for us it cannot but be good to ask ourselves 
what, after all, of our present age virill be thought a thou- 
sand years hence to have been worth preserving, what of all 
our eager struggling and our feverish industry will, aftei" the 
lapse of ten centuries, be still judged to have added some- 
thing to the progress of mankind. 



FREDERIC HARRISON'S 

MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS 

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and again, in the informality of his manner, he gives rein to a whimsi- 
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style a pungent tang or a pleasing piquancy. . . . ' Memories and 
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author; but it is something more and better than this. It is one of the 
most illuminating commentaries upon the life and thought of England 
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